Sharon O'Connor's List: The Singularity

• As human lives and the global   environment become ever more interconnected with technology, we   become increasingly responsible for making wise decisions about how   to use it. We need a balanced opinion on how to apply   technology to human needs.

• "The singularity" occurs in that moment when computers become intelligent enough to upgrade themselves. Self-programming computers will have, argues Vinge, a learning curve that points straight up. In a very short time they will become transcendently intelligent and remodel civilization as they please. We might need to make a few adjustments.

    

  The possibility for a technological singularity depends, of course, on the assumption that computers can become intelligent.
• Vinge agrees that the rise of the open-source software development model -- which links thousands of programmers together via the Net in massively collaborative software creation projects -- offers hope that our collective intelligence may be increasing.

• we are on the edge  of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
• We will see automation  replacing higher and higher level jobs.
• The work that is truly productive is the  domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
• Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than  AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity. I call this  contrasting approach Intelligence Amplification (IA). IA is something  that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized  by its developers for what it is. But every time our ability to access  information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense  we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence. Even now, the  team of a PhD human and good computer workstation (even an off-net  workstation!) could probably max any written intelligence test in  existence.
• Here are some possible projects that take on special   significance, given the IA point of view:
• Human/computer team automation:
• Develop human/computer symbiosis in art:
• Allow human/computer teams at chess tournaments.
• Develop interfaces that allow computer and network access without  requiring the human to be tied to one spot, sitting in front of a  computer.
• Develop more symmetrical decision support systems.
• Use local area nets to make human teams that really work
• Exploit the worldwide Internet as a combination human/machine  tool. Of all the items on the list, progress in this is  proceeding the fastest and may run us into the Singularity before  anything else. The power and influence of even the present-day  Internet is vastly underestimated.
• think the new era is  simply too different to fit into the classical frame of good and  evil.

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