"Vernor Vinge - Singularity" - читать интересную книгу автора (Vinge Vernor)

thereafter.)
o Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake
up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
 o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
o Biological science may provide means to improve natural
human intellect.

The first three possibilities depend in large part on
improvements in computer hardware. Progress in computer hardware has
followed an amazingly steady curve in the last few decades [17]. Based
largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than
human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years. (Charles
Platt [20] has pointed out that AIenthusiasts have been making claims
like this for the last thirty years. Just so I'm not guilty of a
relative-time ambiguity, let me more specific: I'll be surprised if
this event occurs before 2005 or after 2030.)

What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human
intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid.
In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve
the creation of still more intelligent entities -- on a still-shorter
time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past:
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster
than natural selection can do its work -- the world acts as its own
simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability
to internalize the world and conduct "what if's" in our heads; we can
solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection.
Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher
speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human
past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away
of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an
exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that
before were thought might only happen in "a million years" (if ever)
will likely happen in the next century. (In [5], Greg Bear paints a
picture of the major changes happening in a matter of hours.)

I think it's fair to call this event a singularity ("the
Singularity" for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our
old models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move
closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human
affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace.Yet when it finally
happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown. In
the 1950s there were very few who saw it: Stan Ulam [28] paraphrased
John von Neumann as saying:

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of
technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the