Comment by misterman0 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by misterman0 | Hacker News Reader

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I don't think it's necessary for us to get a machine to reach "consciousness", whatever that is, before we realise it's overtaken our mental ability to combine two existing concepts in order to create a new one.

I imagine this is what's going to happen: we humans have drawn two circles (thank you dear fella for that analogy) and we are about to draw a third, combing two existing concepts.

At some point we will have drawn so many circles that the next one will not be drawn by us. It will be drawn by AI.

Who knows when we'll reach that level of machine intelligence and if it even requires them, the machines, to be conscious? But we will, without any doubt, reach a point where there have been so many circles drawn that they are now smarter than us at drawing them. Absolutely without any sort of doubt in my mind this will happen.

Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days. Fuck me if it's not before I die.

>Tens of thousands of people comprehend Einstein's work. It used to be hundreds. We're smart as shit these days.

In some ways, I feel like this is the real singularity. This trend towards feeding and offering education to everyone. Like, it used to be that to be an intellectual, you'd need to be born rich to get the free time and education. I mean, being born rich still helps, sure, but a lot more people are getting a shot.

On the other hand, it's a process that levels off at some point, like everything else. The population is leveling off; as we bring education and leisure time to more and more of the world, eventually most of the people who have the capability to do this sort of thing will have done it.

I mean, I see that with computers, too... like with the leveling out of Moore's law; exponential processes, in nature, tend to not remain exponential.

If you subscribe to the theory of great and continuing, accelerating change due to technological improvements, advanced technological education for everyone is an expected ovservation during the decades or centuries it’s occurring :)

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