What Does a Beer Taste Like After the Singularity?
I dropped in on the Singularity Summit at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see what kind of discourse goes on at the intersection of computer science and science fiction. The idea of the technological singularity defies easy explanation, but I’ll give it a shot: Imagine a techno-futurist rapture (according to some theorists, in the near future) when computer processing and storage has improved to the point where artificial intelligence becomes smarter than human intelligence, and computers are able to improve and refine themselves at an accelerated pace. That pace would be dramatic, possibly exponential, but the character and exact speed of the acceleration is almost beside the point, since the intellectual capabilities of such machines would be, by definition, beyond the comprehension of mere humans. In other words, one day, our machines will get smarter than us, and then they will be able to make machines that are even smarter than them, then those machines will make other machi
I dropped in on the Singularity Summit at the 92nd Street Y in New York City to see what kind of discourse goes on at the intersection of computer science and science fiction. The idea of the technological singularity defies easy explanation, but I’ll give it a shot: Imagine a techno-futurist rapture (according to some theorists, in the near future) when computer processing and storage has improved to the point where artificial intelligence becomes smarter than human intelligence, and computers are able to improve and refine themselves at an accelerated pace. That pace would be dramatic, possibly exponential, but the character and exact speed of the acceleration is almost beside the point, since the intellectual capabilities of such machines would be, by definition, beyond the comprehension of mere humans. In other words, one day, our machines will get smarter than us, and then they will be able to make machines that are even smarter than them, then those machines will make other machi
