Artificial Intelligence - Next phase of evolution: Singularity | Possible in less than 10 years according to Ben Goertzel!

Today as I was walking along I began to imagine what the future would be like. One tends to think very possibly of science fiction. I imagined tall buildings with narrow streets lit up with signs everywhere and holographic figures popping out of everywhere. I stopped for a moment and noticed that there was a very noticeable change in the architecture of the houses; now they all seem to be drab, signifying a change of era. Yes, I love the cyberpunk world and no doubt it was the first thing that came to my mind and inescapably other things like artificial intelligence.

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Salvatore Andrea Santacroce | Unsplash

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If anything, the future is today. We are witnessing a very drastic change in the advancement of technology and we see it every day with each update of the systems, and this somehow makes me worry because supposedly one prepares for something, but that an intelligence advances disproportionately to the human brain, gives much to think about.

Also another concern is the potential ability of an intelligence to achieve singularity status. This means that if this were to happen, the artificial intelligence would surpass the intellectual capacity of the human species, and would therefore have decision-making power over us. This is something I disagree with, unless the development of an intelligence falls into the wrong hands and its purpose is exactly this. For my part, I think that the development of an AI will be exponential over the next few years, but it will not be long before it starts to show signs of being able to interpret and reason something concrete.

The point is, what will happen when an artificial intelligence no longer just tries to solve a request but begins to "think" philosophically, creating questions for itself with the intention of surpassing every limit it encounters and thus developing new discoveries? No one could imagine an intelligence that is capable of finding a way to solve a problem where there is a universal law. A perpetual motion machine comes to mind in which the energy is transformed or there is no need for a source that manages to generate the necessary and lasting impulse so that it works eternally. But it does not exist simply because they violate the laws of thermodynamics (first and second law), but what if an AI finds a way?

Honestly every single discovery that an AI could make would greatly affect the course of humanity, and it is something that at some point could spiral out of control. Obviously this may be far-fetched right now, but no one is assuring that something similar to the example I've laid out (and which interested me once upon a time, when I took a physics/chemistry subject) could not happen.

There will undoubtedly be an upcoming change in this technological era, and many enthusiasts are predicting that AI will play a major role in the next few years - and we are not talking about decades. Ben Goertzel analyzed how AI will behave, considering it an inevitable evolutionary phase.

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Cash Macanaya | Unsplash

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The fact that artificial intelligence is advancing so rapidly is worrying in a certain sense, and even more so if it escapes human control. At the moment we are in a stage of generative AI, which from a prompt generates new content using existing data. ChatGPT had some problems because it could only generate content for queries that had to do with data prior to September 2021. This is something that changed not too long ago and was necessary to face the competition that was already able to generate updated information.

With this in mind, I believe that AIs are rapidly advancing in covering each and every possibility to become the number one star. This is something that works in our favor, because if there is competition they will seek to excel, giving us a better product.

An intelligence superior to the current one is being created called "Artificial General Intelligence" (AGI) that seeks to go beyond the current capabilities. Supposedly this is why we will also see supercomputers that can process information, create it and interpret it ultra-fast. If we have seen what an image-generative AI is capable of, it is truly amazing. At this point Ben points out that within 3 to 8 years we will see dramatic changes as the progress of Meta's Llama2 and OpenAI's GPT-4 have shown progress that is genuine.

The truth is that AI-led technological growth, apart from being drastic because of its exponential behavior, could create an irreversible change in the life of humanity as we know it today. Should we prepare ourselves? Yes, one would think that this would be a thing of the future and that we would barely see the impact in our last breaths of life, but if there is something to be said, it is that this change is premature; we are already in the future.