The Technological Singularity

Up until I was like 15, the way I found new music was through friends or songs that you hear in the background on my favorite TV shows or movies. This could be a really slow process, if you, like me, have a somewhat unconventional taste in music. So it was no surprise that I would only have a few new songs in my playlist every few months.

But as of recent, that's definitely changed. You see, Spotify has been able to identify my tastes remarkably well with its Discover Weekly and Release Radar playlists. Spotify seems to know what I like better than some of my closest friends. It follows a similar trend of surprising improvements in the fields of natural language processing and machine learning.

So when did Spotify and other apps get this good, and what does it mean for the future of technology? These and other recent advances are occurring at a surprising rate, or at least that's what it seems like. After all, technology is progressing exponentially, and we humans are very ill-equipped when it comes to visualizing or imagining such growth. We simply never evolved to do so. Animals, predators, and prey all move at a relatively constant rate; they don't keep accelerating.

Technological progress, however, does. As it turns out, this exponential growth means we might be stepping into some very uncharted territory in the near future. If technology continues to get better and better at its current pace, we will soon reach a stage where it not only matches but surpasses the intelligence of a human. Couple that with an ability to learn and an incentive to survive, and well, we don't know what will happen next.

This is the technological singularity. Borrowed from astrophysics, the term "singularity" refers to a tipping point beyond which all laws that are currently known simply fall apart, like how the laws of physics fall apart beyond the singularity of a black hole. A technological singularity is a similar tipping point when technological progress is so overwhelming that we will no longer be in control of it or the things that will lead to it.

In 1875, Karl Landsteiner, an Austrian biologist, noted that when a man was given a blood transfusion from another animal, the foreign blood tended to clump up in the blood vessels of a man, which can cause shock and then ultimately lead to death. This and years of research that followed led him to discover blood groups, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1930. Today, he is remembered as the father of blood transfusion medicine, and we have him to thank for being able to donate and receive blood safely.

When there is a technological singularity, scientists predict that computers will be able to make life-changing, Nobel Prize-winning discoveries just like this every five seconds. That may seem like an incredible future or potentially life-threatening one, and that's exactly why the prospect of a technological singularity is so complicated. On one hand, it may seem like rapidly progressing technology can eventually enslave humanity. But it also has immense potential to improve human life, and this potential is the reason why it is being developed so rapidly.

There are enormous incentives to devote even more resources to the development of artificial intelligence, economic and otherwise. For example, it can help companies curate products each customer is more likely to buy, something practically impossible to do man-for-man. They can predict when demand is going to be low to curb production and wastage. It can also conduct research faster than any human ever has.

These innovations can lead to other, less inspiring changes in human society too. After all, if scientific research can be done with a computer, what use is there for researchers anymore? If cars can drive themselves and nanobots can repair organs, and 3D printers can literally print bridges, are all jobs simply going to be replaced?

Well, at its current state, the technology we have is only good enough to replace repetitive labor, such as connecting a car door to its chassis. For most things that are more complicated, we still need human intervention. But it's not about now anyways; it’s about the future. And without thorough...