Notes on Singularity

I’ve become interested recently in the “great” cosmological questions. I read last year of the Singularity concept as it pertains to artificial intelligence and its capacity to overwhelm our culture as we now know it. The question that puzzled me was “if we are capable of building ever-smarter computers, what happens if eventually the machines themselves can improve their own capabilities?” Would we render our own species extinct (or at least obsolete) by inventing the world’s LAST necessary machine?

What does it mean for our progeny that more technological advances have been made in the last 50 years than in the last 50,000? And that goes for whatever field you’re in….medicine, computing, engineering, or farming.

Modern physics refers to “singularity” as the point at which there is infinite mass packed into an infinitely small point. Most scientists call this the “Big Bang” point. At that point conventional laws of physics break down and become meaningless. Even light (and thus time itself) do not behave in any predictable fashion. Are we on the cusp of a technological singularity that might break down the fabric of human society? In simpler terms, might technology advance through supercomputers so fast that we cannot “keep up” intellectually? What are the consequences of unlocking the human DNA genome? What is possible with so-called “nanotechnology”, sub-cellular machines that might literally eat cancer cells out of our own bodies?

These used to be fantastical questions reserved for the George Orwells and Aldous Huxleys of the fictional world. Now, I am not so sure. Please read the following link about the recent discovery of the largest prime number, 9.1 million digits long. Ordinarily, one might think this a huge waste of time and taxpayer money. However, the blue highlighted paragraphs I pasted from a discussion board attached to this news article.

It really made me think again about the whole Singularity concept. Exciting or terrifying? What’s your vote?

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060104/ap_on_sc/largest_prime_number

The challenge in finding very large prime numbers represents an advancement in computer science - the mathematical facet of this accomplishment is less remarkable. The technology to use large networks of computers to solve computationally bound problems is still in it's infancy. Problems like finding Mersenne primes would take thousands - maybe millions of years of computation if programmed on the world's fastest conventional central processor.

In contrast distributed processing among a large number of computers is needed for modelling proteins to stimulate the immune system, genetic engineering, cryptology and data mining (imagine being able to do a google search for an image NOT coded into the file name - like searching for a picture of a "box jellyfish" and having the search engine know what a box jellyfish looks like even though the file name has no such reference embedded in it - non-trivial to say the least!)