This is rather interesting.
Yes, machines have needs. One of those is identical to a human need - energy. Without energy, neither man nor machine can function. And I have to wonder just how many decades it will take before machines can actually establish and maintain their own energy supply without human assistance.
And I'm also a bit doubtful if a machine can ever become truly intelligent. For one thing, despite our best attempts and plans, how can a machine be given the ability to generate true, original thought? That's
the one factor that truly divides humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. And I don't see how we could ever give that "ability" to a machine - regardless of how large it's database or how fast it can crunch numbers.
Well, right now we don't have even the faintest clue as to how it will happen.
But consider the leap. My desktop isn't ten times more powerful than the most powerful PC in 1990. It isn't a thousand times more powerful. It's something like 1.5 million times as powerful. And the rate of increase is--itself--increasing.
A single $1000 laptop in 2020 will be more powerful than a human brain. A single laptop in 2035 will be more powerful than all human brains. We've already reverse engineered parts of our brain. It took scientists 2 years between 1988 and 1990 to map 1/10,000th of the human genome. The consortium that funded the HGP gave them fifteen years for the rest and those scientists--blind to the advancing computer technology--were furious. Guess how much time it took to complete the other 9,999/10,000ths? Seven years. Guess how long it takes scientists to map any genome now? A couple months.
It took a supercomputer, in 1985, a full year to calculate how to fold a protein accurately (something your cell does in a second). A supercomputer did it in a month in 1995. A supercomputer did it in a day in 2000. My new desktop can calculate folded proteins now in a couple minutes. The newest supercomputers can calculate folded proteins in milliseconds now and can calculate millions of them simultaneously.
I just don't get how you can "doubt" that a machine could become intelligent. Are you implying that there is something magical about organic computers? That's preposterous.
The reason it's called a "singularity" is for the same reason a black hole is called a "singularity": It is the point, beyond which, we cannot fathom, imagine, estimate or predict.
Technology doesn't increase along an intuitive plane. It isn't increasing at "10% ever two years". Its increasing parabolic and the rate of parabolic increase is, itself, increasing. Doubt me? Look at any study at the rate of increase of the increase of the increase of technology. It's increasing exponentially.
We will reach a point where the creative designs in machines are created by other machines (Intel and Motorola has virtually taken humans out of CPU design architecture--it's all done by supercomputers anyway). The time from design to production has fallen--in accordance with Moore's Law--exponentially. Eventually the time from design to production will be on the order of minutes, then seconds. At that point the increase of technology in a single year will be greater than all time previous to that year.
I think the reason people argue so passionately against it, is because we/they are passionate about our bodies, our humanity, our world essentially remaining "human". There is a saying, "Men will defend, most passionately, that which he doubts the most." And it's true here. It is frightening to imagine no more humans; the end of humanity. Possibly the end of our world as we can envision it. By arguing and--in any event winning an argument--on where we will go will assuage their deepest fears and buy them peace, even if it isn't true. It doesn't matter. Emotional comfort is rarely rested in the truth or reality (just look at religion, they can't ALL be right, yet people still stick to them passionately).
And the truth is, there are people here, on this website, right now, who will live to see the singularity. Whether we survive it or become one with it nobody knows. But it's coming and it is completely unavoidable.
~String