
I hope that I'm not around to witness "the Singularity". This is a spooky point in the future at which artificial intelligence (AI) is predicted to surpass human intelligence. Just as the term "singularity" is used to describe a black hole and the meltdown of the laws of physics within it, an intelligence singularity is similarly supposed to lead to unprecedented weirdness.
Why? Because the ultra-intelligent machines that we create, it is fancied, will go on to create even smarter machines. This process could result in an exponential explosion in intelligence that will relegate people to the status of an amoeba or, perhaps, a domestic cat. It is not a flippant analogy: some academics envisage that super-intelligent machines will one day keep human beings as pets.
IBM revealed its plans to build a robot that learns how to learn, by modelling its software on the brain of a child.
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