"Vernor Vinge. The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" - читать интересную книгу автора

One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of
technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the
appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the
history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them,
could not continue.

Von Neumann even uses the term singularity, though it appears he
is thinking of normal progress, not the creation of superhuman
intellect. (For me, the superhumanity is the essence of the
Singularity. Without that we would get a glut of technical riches,
never properly absorbed (see [25]).)

In the 1960s there was recognition of some of the implications of
superhuman intelligence. I. J. Good wrote [11]:

Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine
that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of
these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
design even better machines; there would then unquestionably
be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man
would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent
machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make,
provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
keep it under control.
...
It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century,
an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
the last invention that man need make.

Good has captured the essence of the runaway, but does not pursue
its most disturbing consequences. Any intelligent machine of the sort
he describes would not be humankind's "tool" -- any more than humans
are the tools of rabbits or robins or chimpanzees.

Through the '60s and '70s and '80s, recognition of the cataclysm
spread [29] [1] [31] [5]. Perhaps it was the science-fiction writers
who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the "hard"
science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories
about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers
felt an opaque wall across the future. Once, they could put such
fantasies millions of years in the future [24]. Now they saw that
their most diligent extrapolations resulted in the unknowable ...
soon. Once, galactic empires might have seemed a Post-Human domain.
Now, sadly, even interplanetary ones are.

What about the '90s and the '00s and the '10s, as we slide toward
the edge? How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the
human world view? For a while yet, the general critics of machine
sapience will have good press. After all, till we have hardware as