The upcoming technological singularity / 'Alternative' scientific theorization

[Jabberwocky]

ebola, you need to read accelerando asap.

[fwiw, this is creative commons/open licensing. just dl'd a copy :] ]

 

[Jabberwocky]

^ Indeed. If I invented a machine from scratch that I had reason to believe possessed true and testable intelligent self-awareness, I'd be very careful who I showed it to or told about it. The institutions most willing and able to make something like this happen have a lot of good reasons to be secretive about it. This is one of the main themes of the original novel Frankenstein.

It's not so tinfoil hat to suppose that something close to AI has already been invented, and only an inner circle of highly trusted US military elites, Sony executives, or rogue scientists in a compound in Siberia even have a clue it exists. It's the kind of invention that you wouldn't want the public to know all the details on until they'd already fully accepted many technological applications of it without realizing it. This is exactly how other controversial and existentially scary technologies have snuck in the back door to public acceptance, like nuclear weapons and genetically modified food.

sorry i was unclear, i didn't mean that in a sense of it being hidden, but in the sense that we are already artificially-enhancing human intelligence right now, as a matter of routine in many instances (ie, that "artificial intelligence" need not exclude artificially-enhanced humans, whether we're talking about the beginnings of brain-interfacing, or simply bio/med enhancements, or just obvious stuff like the volumes of knowledge available at many ppl's fingertips via phones connected to the web)
/hope that makes sense, that's the best i can parrot that line of thinking from a singularity speech by peter thiel i saw recently

 

[ebola?]

In a sense, human intelligence has always been artificially augmented. Our artifacts offload some of the cognitive processing from our STM and LTM, freeing resources and structuring thought and practice. However, this is a pretty different thing from an 'intelligent artifact'.
...
Okay. We need to get things clearer: what would it be for a 'device' to exhibit intelligence?

ebola