# Artificial intelligence (singulairty) within a few months? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Tags:** ai\ **Created:** [March 18, 2023, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-intelligence-singulairty-within-a-few-months/981324 "2023-03-18T13:24:41Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 35
**Author:** ![Riemann](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/riemann/32/3133_2.png) [@Riemann](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Riemann)\ **Post date:** [March 19, 2023, 10:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-intelligence-singulairty-within-a-few-months/981324/35 "2023-03-19T10:33:03Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > Take someone from 30 years ago, and do the same, and they’ll find themselves in an absolutely incomprehensible world… And that’s true of any 30-year-span: Someone from 1980 would have felt the same in 2010, as would someone from 1066 in 1096. > [@Chronos](#): > > Yes, technology is advancing at an unprecedented rate nowadays. But that also has always been true. That’s the nature of exponential growth: It always looks the same. This is nonsense with respect to cultural/technological change, because we are not (yet) changing our mental hardware and operating system along with our culture. Humans have been born with essentially the same brains for thousands of years. Each new physically identical human must acquire all cultural knowledge and understanding of technology from scratch. So even if we grant the dubious assumption that there has been no qualitative change and that we’re talking about continuous exponential growth of technology, the later stages of exponential growth do _not_ look the same, they obviously imply a much larger change with respect to our static innate mental capacity. > [@Chronos](#): > > The Singularity is about 30 years away, just like it’s always been for all of recorded human history. If you’re older than that, you’ve already lived through it once. If you’re old enough, you might even have lived through it twice or even three times. > > This is why old people so often feel out of touch with the world: Because they’re on the other side of one or more Singularities. I don’t know what you’re talking about here, but “singularity” with respect to AI means something specific, a qualitative change that is certainly _not_ just a continuation of past exponential processes. If we achieve AGI, it opens up the possibility of positive feedback whereby the AGI can improve its own software and hardware. Even if the first version were only equal to or slightly better than human programmers, it could run a large number of instances of itself, and each iteration could better and faster at improving itself. A runaway positive feedback process might rapidly achieve superintelligence. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/artificial-intelligence-singulairty-within-a-few-months/981324)._