Image via Wikipedia

And we are helping it along.

The Singularity will come when intelligent robots are all around us. There will be a change in the human world like nothing ever seen before. For more on the Singularity, read Victor Vinge.

Today, in my Twitter feed, I find two articles on robots and artificial intelligence. There was I have seen the future and its sky is full of eyes, about the drone airplanes that are beginning to fill the skies, both civilian and military, peaceful and policing.

And there was an article on the living toys that ex-Pixar engineers are going to be creating.

From the article:

Imagine the youngest of children using Web-connected toys carrying character-driven chatterbot artificial intelligence programs. If done well, the possibilities for child development, education, language learning and more are awe inspiring to consider.

<sarcasm>Just what we need: intelligent robots to whom we can turn over our children’s development.</sarcasm>

Seriously, there are 4 possibilities for life after the singularity, listed in order of decreasing likelihood. These are paraphrased from Josh Cogliati.

1. The sky’s the limit: The robots tell us we can’t go any higher than the top of Earth’s atmosphere, ie no more satellites for us, no more space travel.
2. No more humans: The robots exterminate humans.
3. No more transistors: Thou shall not create transistors. Transistors are the foundation of all computing. If we get really scared of the robots, we will never create another computer.
4. Technology is indistinguishable from magic. This is what most people imagine when they imagine life with robots. Highly unlikely. If robots are truly intelligent, they are people and we can’t enslave them (because slavery is wrong). And how do you actually enslave someone with thousands of times your intelligence?

Related Articles

• Singularity Summit 2010 in San Francisco to Explore Intelligence Augmentation (prweb.com)