To make a stronger case for such dangers, I use this article by Drake Baer; presented here without much change given its well written content.
In this recent article, we read about the predictions of Futurist Ray Kurzweil. He relates what is happening by retelling the tale of the inventor of chess and his patron, the Emperor of China. As it goes in the tale, we read in response to the emperor’s offer of a
reward for his new beloved game, the inventor asked for a single grain of rice
on the first square, two on the second square, four on the third, and so on.
The Emperor quickly granted this seemingly benign and humble request. One version of the story has the emperor
going bankrupt as the 63 doublings ultimately totaled 18 million trillion
grains of rice. At ten grains of rice per square inch, this requires rice
fields covering twice the surface area of the Earth, oceans included. Another
version of the story has the inventor losing his head.
Therein lies the most terrifying,
exciting, and mystifying aspect of Futurist Ray Kurzweil's thesis ~ The
Law of Accelerating Returns which states that "fundamental measures
of information technology follow predictable and exponential
trajectories."
That's because, Kurzweil says, humans
are linear by nature — and technology is exponential.
Technology's relentless, predictable,
and exponential growth will, according to the law of accelerating returns,
bring humans into the era that Kurzweil is most closely associated with, the
singularity.
"As exponential growth continues to
accelerate into the first half of the twenty-first century," he writes.
"It will appear to explode into infinity, at least from the limited and
linear perspective of contemporary humans."
The singularity (or Singularity) is
used to describe the era when artificial intelligence supplants human
intelligence as the most-capable processing power around.
CEO of SpaceX, product architect of Tesla
Motors and chairman of SolarCity Elon Musk has repeatedly said that we should
be afraid of these high technologies. He's said that that "with artificial
intelligence we're summoning the demon," and that it poses the biggest
existential threat to humans". But for the rest of us, the issue isn't
whether Futurist Ray Kurzweil’s
Law of Accelerating Returns is good or bad. Simply that it exists.
How far is the social imagination willing to go?
*Source of Kurzweil article - http://finance.yahoo.com/news/google-genius-futurist-one-theory-183400084.html
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