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Comment by jpirkola | Hacker News Reader

Try searching AGI or "strong AI", which is a new movement trying to achieve general AI rather than application specific. I have got a good article on that: http://www.cybertechnews.org/?p=689

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Don't go into THAT field unless you have guts of STEEL.

Either that or believe in the singularity.

I'm saying even if you do buy any of the three common definitions of "Singularity" (http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools) then you still don't go into AGI unless you're willing to embark on the equivalent of a 30-year startup.

How many successful Internet entrepreneurs do you know? Okay, now how many successful AGI projects do you know? That tells you something about the relative difficulty here.

Basic research in the midst of scientific chaos is HARD.

The singularity is probably inevitable. I doubt it we'll see it in our lifetimes, though.

Why? If you buy into exponentially increasing progress, then most of the graphs seem to indicate that it will happen within a lifespan from now, especially if you consider the medical advances that will come in the intervening time.

All real-world exponential curves I can think of eventually reverse precipitously, or at least plateau.

This is mentioned in Kurzweil's Singularity book. With Moores Law, he expects transistors to peak at 2020 and molecular computing to take over after that and continue the growth.

He believes innovation and paradigm shifts supplement the plateauing of S-curves.

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