I've really gone sour on the singularity in recent years. It seems to be yet another one of those cases where someone projects out from incomplete data and assumes unbounded infinite growth despite the fact that such a thing never happens in nature. Any time you see someone project out in a simple exponential growth curve you know their projection is bullshit. Growth curves are always S-Curves. Always.
It's like asking how many more flies there would be in the world if you failed to squish one back in the 80s. You calculate out the lifespan and size of the brood and discover that the entire solar system would be filled with housefly if you had let that one live. In truth the number of flies is bounded by food and water availability.
Artificial Intelligences are almost certainly going to run into the same limitations that prevent natural intelligences from becoming godlike. It's hard to quantify because our measures of intelligence are so vague, but from what I've seen of AI research thus far it will be a herculean effort to get something that's as smart as an average human and pushing beyond that is going to run into some serious fundamental limits in power density, cooling, quantum tunneling leakage, and so on.
It's like asking how many more flies there would be in the world if you failed to squish one back in the 80s. You calculate out the lifespan and size of the brood and discover that the entire solar system would be filled with housefly if you had let that one live. In truth the number of flies is bounded by food and water availability.
Artificial Intelligences are almost certainly going to run into the same limitations that prevent natural intelligences from becoming godlike. It's hard to quantify because our measures of intelligence are so vague, but from what I've seen of AI research thus far it will be a herculean effort to get something that's as smart as an average human and pushing beyond that is going to run into some serious fundamental limits in power density, cooling, quantum tunneling leakage, and so on.