Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years.
That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide.
Many skeptics warn that extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence may crumble as the industry struggles with the limits of the raw materials needed to build A.I., including electrical power, digital data, mathematics and computing capacity.
When the term artificial intelligence was first presented to the public during a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists gathered there did not think it would take long to build machines that could match the power of the human brain.
Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto professor who helped develop neural network technology and may be more responsible for its success than any other researcher, once dismissed Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would exceed human intelligence before the end of this decade.
But the trends that anchor Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computer power and other technologies over long periods of time — do not always keep going the way people expect them to, said Sayash Kapoor, a Princeton University researcher and co-author of the influential online newsletter “A.I.
The original article contains 1,423 words, the summary contains 266 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Sitting near a window inside Boston’s Four Seasons Hotel, overlooking a duck pond in the city’s Public Garden, Ray Kurzweil held up a sheet of paper showing the steady growth in the amount of raw computer power that a dollar could buy over the last 85 years.
That diagonal line, he said, showed why humanity was just 20 years away from the Singularity, a long hypothesized moment when people will merge with artificial intelligence and augment themselves with millions of times more computational power than their biological brains now provide.
Many skeptics warn that extravagant predictions about artificial intelligence may crumble as the industry struggles with the limits of the raw materials needed to build A.I., including electrical power, digital data, mathematics and computing capacity.
When the term artificial intelligence was first presented to the public during a 1956 conference at Dartmouth College, Dr. Minsky and the other computer scientists gathered there did not think it would take long to build machines that could match the power of the human brain.
Geoffrey Hinton, the University of Toronto professor who helped develop neural network technology and may be more responsible for its success than any other researcher, once dismissed Mr. Kurzweil’s prediction that machines would exceed human intelligence before the end of this decade.
But the trends that anchor Mr. Kurzweil’s predictions — simple line graphs showing the growth of computer power and other technologies over long periods of time — do not always keep going the way people expect them to, said Sayash Kapoor, a Princeton University researcher and co-author of the influential online newsletter “A.I.
The original article contains 1,423 words, the summary contains 266 words. Saved 81%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!