Yale Daily News - FEAR THE SINGULARITY

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FEAR THE SINGULARITY

Coffee was our sole objective as we slunk and scuttled into the 92nd Street Y, in New York, last Saturday at 7 a.m. Trembling with anticipation, we had arrived almost a full hour early to the fourth annual Singularity Summit. We had hoped for an empty lobby and untouched fruit platters to help us get our bearings and settle into the right state of mind. Instead, we were greeted by a long line of attendees, bustling with excitement.

Behind us, there were computer hackers — some pony-tailed, most overweight, almost all clad in leather jackets — mingling with tech hippies sporting braided goatees and yoga pants. To the left, East Asian businessmen munched on bagel chips and hummus before returning to their booths to pedal their tech wares. Though they seemed incomprehensible at the time, we came to a better understanding of the attendees’ motives for schlepping from various parts of the country to New York, once we got a better grasp of the tenets behind the Singularity.

The Singularity connotes a moment in time; to be precise, some moment in 2029, when the first “super-intelligent” machine will arise, capable of improving on its own source code without human input. The sayings go that shortly thereafter, humans will fuse with computers, rendering biology obsolete and effectively marking the end of human history. These machines will communicate at the speed of light, exchanging knowledge of our civilization and pooling memories and ...

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http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/2009/10/16/fear-singularity/

http://www.yaledailynews.com/scene/2009/10/16/fear-singularity/