Is the Singularity coming? Hudson Valley Almanac Weekly

Stephen Hawking made headlines at the end of 2014 when, in a BBC interview, he said that we should be very wary of developing "full artificial intelligence" as it "could spell the end of the human race." His doomsday musings were hardly original. SpaceX's Elon Musk had said the same thing earlier that year, warning that AI is "potentially more dangerous than nukes." The worrisome idea of computers possessing greater than human intelligence, coupled with a sudden independent consciousness, was first termed "The Singularity" back in 1993, in a paper by the computer scientist Vernor Vinge. And while his initial predictions about vast computer improvements merely mirrored the foresight of others – like the expected frequent doubling in computer power envisioned by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965 – Vinge believed it would lead to "change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth." As we all know, computers already control and facilitate much of our daily life from banking to robotic automobile assembly, and no one wants to return to the old days of manual drudgery for menial tasks like repetitive spot welding.