AI ‘singularity’ less than 10 years away, experts warn

AI experts are warning that the singularity — a point at which artificial intelligence will surpass human control — is only a few years away.

The warning comes as the tech industry intensifies its development of artificial general intelligence (AGI) technology which enables machines to not only perform certain tasks like humans but to perform all tasks that humans can. AGI is seen as the precursor to the singularity.

SingularityNET CEO Ben Goertzel, who holds a Ph.D in mathematics from Temple University, told Decrypt last week that the singularity is less than a decade away.

“I would say now, three to eight years is my take, and the reason is partly that large language models like Meta's Llama2 and OpenAI's GPT-4 help and are genuine progress,” Goertzel said. “These systems have greatly increased the enthusiasm of the world for AGI, so you'll have more resources, both money and just human energy—more smart young people want to plunge into work and working on AGI.”

Computer scientist and The Fusion Threshold author Ron Sones also says humanity is only a few years away from the singularity. Providing a more in-depth explanation, Sones describes the singularity as a point at which the value of something becomes so high that it becomes meaningless to talk about it, when the normal laws of physics no longer apply. In this case, the speed at which all brain-computer interfaces will communicate with each other will achieve a breakdown in the structural laws of our world. 

“[A]s brain-computer interfaces (BCIs) are developed, and people become linked together through these interfaces, the speed at which people will develop technology related to all technology fields, not just the BCIs, will increase exponentially, since all of the developments will have impact on all of the others,” said Sones.

Tech experts who are working on AGI include Elon Musk, whose company Neuralink seeks to use human thoughts to directly transmit information. The goal, said Musk, is to merge humans with AI “[s]uch that the future of the world is controlled by the combined will of the people of Earth. . . .  I think that that’s obviously gonna be the future that we want.”

In his 1984 book, Sones predicted the technological concept currently being developed by Musk’s Neuralink.

"Suppose that instead of entering information into a computer through a keyboard, a mechanism only marginally improved during the century or so since it was invented, what if we could somehow transmit information directly from our minds into computers through some kind of radio frequency link?” Sones wrote nearly forty years ago. “But then further suppose that many computer users could do the same thing, and that these users were linked together through a large communications network, and that the high speed links between the computers and the users were two-way, rather than just one way?”

Sones’ vision was briefly described 48 years earlier by another scientist — Nikola Tesla.

"When wireless is perfectly applied the whole earth will be converted into a huge brain, which in fact it is, all things being particles of a real and rhythmic whole. We shall be able to communicate with one another instantly, irrespective of distance," Tesla said in 1926, according to recently resurfaced documents.