Why the Singularity is Not Coming Anytime Soon

I have been absent from this blog for a while.  I am working on some things to post here - mostly to do with economics.  I am persuaded that we need to get a some "general concepts" of economics into our heads so we can make rational political decisions, instead of the craziness that is going on out there.

But - that is taking me a bit of time.  I am reading stuff, etc.

Today, I stumbled on an article published this very day, that hit me so perfectly that I had to share it with someone - you, for instance.  It is about "The Singularity", or Artificial Intelligence.  Fellow name of Ray Kurzweil talks about it all the time.  I got this from Zite - it's an app for iPhone, iPad, etc.  It serves up stuff based on my likes and dislikes - my personal magazine.  Check it out as well.

This piece is an amazing summary of this Singularity or AI idea, covering its history - and then pointing out the real fallacies in that approach.  Kurzweil's idea is that we are advancing so rapidly in our technology, that it will not be long before we build a "brain" smarter than ourselves, at which point that brain can make one smarter than itself, and so on.  At that point - intelligence explodes, and we are somewhat irrelevant.

I always thought that Mr. Kurzweil and others were ignoring a major part of what humans are - our body!  They are focused on just the brain - but what goes on in our "intelligence" and capabilities is much more complex than that.  AND - this brain is the product of a few million years of evolution.  I am sure we can eventually understand it fully - but we are MANY years away from doing that.  It is even more likely that we will manage our own evolutionary development long before we get an artificial one up and running.

But . . . go read the article.  The author says it much, much better than I can manage.
   http://ieet.org/index.php/IEET/more/scaruffi20130211

If that link dies, you can go to the website:  www.ieet.org and look for the author, piero scaruffi.  The organization is the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies.  What a novel idea!