Futurists say that our destiny will be shaped by the Singularity, the moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence.
Scholars don't agree on the details, but they say it will happen between 30 and 1000 years from today, with most predicting it will emerge in the next century.
It will almost certainly have profoundly scary — and deeply exciting — consequences.
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Everything is going to change.
The term 'Singularity' was first used in the technological sense (as opposed to its definition within physics) by Hungarian American mathematician John von Neumann.
In 1958, he said"ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, can not continue."
An 'intelligence explosion' will allow machines to make better machines.
In a 1965 essay [PDF], mathematician I. J. Good predicted that machines will eventually be able to create better machines.
His full quote:
Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the
intellectual activities of any man however clever.
Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an “intelligence explosion”, and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make.
No less a mind than Stephen Hawking is freaked out by it.
If AI becomes better at designing AI than humans, we'll hit an intelligence explosion that "ultimately results in machines whose intelligence exceeds ours by more than ours exceeds that of snails," Hawking said in a recent Reddit AMA.
The machines are (maybe) going to take over.
Alan Turing, the visionary British mathematician played by Benedict Cumberbatch in "The Imitation Game," took a grim view of the singularity.
Not only would machines out-think us, he said, but they'd have no use for us.
"One the machine thinking method had started, it would not take long to outstrip our feeble powers,"he wrote in a 1951 paper.
"There would be no question of the machines dying, and they would be able to converse with each other to sharpen their wits," he wrote. "At some stage therefore we should have to expect the machines to take control."
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