announced in December 2012. “Fast forward a decade—Google has
demonstrated self-driving cars, and people are indeed asking questions
of their Android phones.”
Kurzweil’s most daring predictions have to do with an even bigger
issue—artificial general intelligence. Not only is he optimistic, but he
is also quite specific in his pronouncements. Kurzweil believes that
computers will have enough awareness to pass the Turing test by 2029.
Their breadth of knowledge, he says, will allow machines to converse as
coherently and naturally as humans do.
But Kurzweil sees this achievement as a mere stepping-stone on
the road to superintelligence. In his view, machines will continue to
improve, reprogramming themselves and downloading massive amounts
of information from the Internet until they exceed human intelligence.
Kurzweil predicts that this new reality, known as the Singularity, will
occur in 2045. First coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge
in 1993, Singularity describes a time when machines have surpassed
humans in intelligence and become trillions of times more powerful
than the computers of the early twenty-first century. Kurzweil envisions
the Singularity as a transformed world in which machines will make us
better and smarter and will prolong our lives indefinitely.
THE LAWOF ACCELERATING RETURNS
Kurzweil bases his predictions on what he calls the Law of Accelerating
Returns, a variant of Moore’s Law. Moore’s Law is named for Gordon
Moore, who cofounded the computer chip company Intel. In the
1960s, he observed that the transistors that controlled electric currents
in computers were shrinking in size so fast that each year, twice as many
could fit on a computer chip as the year before. Kurzweil’s law applies
this same doubling to the speed, memory, and power of computers.
75
The Singularity
