A minority felt that the largest 1992 computers were within three orders of magnitude of the power of the human brain.
And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
And it's very likely that IA is a much easier road to the achievement of superhumanity than pure AI.
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
Based largely on this trend, I believe that the creation of greater than human intelligence will occur during the next thirty years.
But as I noted at the beginning of this paper, there are other paths to superhumanity.
But Drexler argues that we can confine such transhuman devices so that their results can be examined and used safely.
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.
But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
Computer networks and human-computer interfaces seem more mundane than AI, and yet they could lead to the Singularity.
Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
I am suggesting that we recognize that in network and interface research there is something as profound (and potential wild) as Artificial Intelligence.
I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
I believe that our best guesses about the post-Singularity world can be obtained by thinking on the nature of strong superhumanity.
I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.
IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
It is a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.
Note that I am not proposing that AI research be ignored or less funded.
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
The notion of ego and self-awareness has been the bedrock of the hardheaded rationalism of the last few centuries.
The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.
The problem is not simply that the Singularity represents the passing of humankind from center stage, but that it contradicts our most deeply held notions of being.
The work that is truly productive is the domain of a steadily smaller and more elite fraction of humanity.
We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
Well, maybe it won't happen at all: Sometimes I try to imagine the symptoms that we should expect to see if the Singularity is not to develop.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.
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