Hiya meatbags!
This is Faisal, an ultra-intelligent cybernetic life form sent from the far future to educate
the dumb humans of this era.
In this video, I’m going to teach you about Artificial Intelligence and Technological
Singularity.
So without any further ado, let’s get started.
Artificial intelligence or AI is intelligence exhibited by machines.
The term "AI" is applied when a machine mimics cognitive functions like that of humans,
such as learning and problem solving.
Generally speaking, there are two types of artificial intelligence.
The first one is artificial narrow intelligence or ANI.
This is the AI that we’re capable of creating today.
ANI is specialized in a single type of task or a set of similar tasks; the one it was
created for, such as voice recognition, playing chess, driving cars or organizing your Facebook
newsfeed.
The second type of AI is artificial general intelligence or AGI.
AGI don’t currently exist and while most of our research is directed towards ANI, we’re
getting closer to AGI each year.
Unlike ANI, AGI is supposed to be general-purpose and have the ability to learn to do almost
anything.
AGI is rather hard to create.
Its like creating a living consciousness inside a computer, which can think like us and has
a personality of its own.
There can be different ways to how this can be achieved.
The first one is “Whole Brain Emulation” or WBE.
In Layman’s terms, it simply means to scan and map a biological brain in detail and then
replicate it cell by cell into a computer.
So basically, instead of creating a brain, we’re copying an existing one.
The computer runs a simulation model so similar to the original that it will behave in essentially
the same way as the original brain.
But the problem here is that we don’t possess the computational hardware required to map
a human brain, yet.
You see, human brain is extremely powerful and its simulation requires an extremely powerful
computer.
An average human brain has about 100 billion neurons.
Each neuron has on average 7,000 synaptic connections to other neurons.
The brain of a three-year-old child has about one quadrillion synapses, which declines to
500 trillion in adults.
Brain processes information at the rate of about 100 trillion synaptic updates per second.
In 1997, famous futurist Ray Kurzweil estimated the hardware required to equal the human brain
and adopted a figure of 10 raised to power 16 computations per second, equivalent to
10 PetaFLOPS of computing speed, which was achieved in 2011.
The fastest supercomputer today, Sunway TaihuLight has the processing speed of more than 93 PetaFLOPS.
So, what’s stopping us from doing it?
Well, the artificial neuron model assumed by Kurzweil and used in many current artificial
neural network implementations is very oversimplified compared with biological neurons.
A brain simulation would likely have to capture the detailed cellular behavior of biological
neurons, presently only understood in the broadest of outlines.
A detailed modeling of neural behavior (especially on a molecular scale) would require computational
powers several orders of magnitude larger than Kurzweil's estimate.
Besides that, our poor understanding of human intelligence is also a major drawback.
Most predictions place it after 2025 as a period when WBE would be possible.
Thanks to exponential advancement in technology.
Another method is the use of evolutionary algorithms.
These algorithms mimic the biological evolution to learn and evolve from experience.
Surely, it is way faster than the biological evolution, but it’ll still take a lot of
time.
This approach has been used to create very simple ANI, but if ever applied to AGI, it’ll
be extremely slow.
Our poor understanding of human mind, inadequate funding and our inefficient computer hardware
are a few of the biggest obstacles we face today in the creation of AGI.
Nevertheless, it is inevitable (provided that we don’t get ourselves extinct due to global
warming or a nuclear world war before that).
Throughout the human history, the speed of human development had been increasing gradually,
till the industrial revolution, when it started rising exponentially.
This is called the second half of chess board, where the exponents go crazy and their values
increase wildly.
It directly intersects with the Law of Accelerating Returns and the Moore’s Law.
See it like this, Wright brothers invented the aircraft in 1903.
About 65 years later, man stepped on the moon for the first time.
And just 5 years later, computers made their way into the homes of the general population.
There were 8000 transistors on an IC in 1974.
In 2015, that transistor count reached 10 billion.
Also, the size of transistors has shrunk from 10 thousand nanometers to just 10 nanometers.
Even the single-atom transistors have been fabricated.
Although, it’ll be very long before they are commercially available.
We have made more progress in the last century than the rest of the documented human history
combined.
As we get more advanced, the rate of our technological change accelerates and with time, even this
acceleration accelerates.
This acceleration in technological advancement makes it very easy for us to predict the future
with incredible accuracy.
According to careful calculations and estimates by notable scientists, the singularity is
inevitable.
And sooner or later, it will happen.
The real question is, When?
When AGI is created, it’ll learn at an exponential rate and will become artificial super intelligence
or ASI.
ASI will be smarter than all the humans who ever set foot on this planet combined and
it won’t be restricted by emotion, morality or other distractions like we are.
Now, there are two ways that how this evolution of an AGI to an ASI could turn out.
It can either have a soft take-off or a hard take-off.
A soft take-off is that AGI is restricted by built-in safeguards (kinda like the Asimov’s
three laws of robotics) or hardware limitations.
This will make that AI easier to control and its learning process will be slower.
On the other hand, a hard take-off is if an AGI gains access to the internet and all the
other resources it needs.
In this case, it can evolve into an ASI in a matter of minutes or perhaps, seconds.
A hard take-off will be extremely risky because it’ll make the ASI unpredictable.
By the way, I already know which one it'll be.
But can’t tell ya.
Paradox and stuff you know?
Anyways, the invention of AGI will trigger a runaway reaction of self-improvement cycles.
The AGI will learn and evolve.
The smarter it gets, the faster it will improve itself with each new and more intelligent
generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion.
Suppose it then designs an even more capable machine, or re-writes its own code to become
even more intelligent; this even more capable machine then goes on to design a machine of
yet greater capability, and so on.
These iterations of recursive self-improvement accelerate, allowing enormous qualitative
change, resulting in the emergence of ASI.
This is what futurists call “The Technological Singularity”.
Named after the infinitely small one-dimensional space inside a black hole, where density and
gravity become infinite and space-time curves infinitely, and where the laws of physics
as we know them cease to operate, it is the hypothesis that the invention of artificial
superintelligence will abruptly trigger runaway technological growth, resulting in unfathomable
changes to human civilization.
Alright, the ASI has emerged into the world.
What’s next?
Well, ASI would be incomprehensible to humans and its actions would be unpredictable and
unstoppable.
After the appearance of ASI, its either immortality or extinction for humanity.
There’s no in between.
It all depends on how the ASI reacts.
This artificial superintelligence will become the dominant force on our planet.
The reason for this is smarter-than-human intelligence.
With the power of a supercomputer with at least yottabytes of memory and processing
speeds billions of time greater than a human, it could perform a month’s worth of thinking
in a second.
Through the global CCTV and satellite systems, it’ll have sensory capabilities vaster than
humans.
Many careful estimates by experts put singularity somewhere between 2040 & 2050.
If you’re less than 20, it is highly likely that you’ll witness the singularity.
Singularity will completely change our world.
It will instigate the biggest paradigm shift humanity has ever witnessed.
The difficult thing to keep sight of when you're talking about the Singularity is that
even though it sounds like science fiction, it isn't, no more than a weather forecast
is science fiction.
Its a serious hypothesis about the future of life on Earth.
There's an intellectual gag reflex that kicks in anytime you try to swallow an idea that
involves super-intelligent immortal cyborgs, but suppress it if you can, because while
the Singularity appears to be ridiculous, it's an idea conceived of sober, careful evaluation.
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In our next video, we’ll take a look at the post-singularity probabilities.
So until then, stay tuned.
Nice knowing you, meatbags!