Singularity and intelligence explosion in William Hertling's A.I. Apocalypse

William Hertling's A.I. Apocalypse (2012) is a post-apocalyptic novel about vulnerability of modern technological life against superintelligence. The novel shows living in an A.I-controlled society behind a revolution or revolt by self-controlling machines. A personified computer virus infects all the world's computers. As a result, it leads to disruption in main factors of human life - billions of people are about to die. A novel in which, Hertling warns of dehumanization under the shadow of superintelligence to challenge our minds to ponder about such a future. This study attempts to demonstrate that Hertling criticizes singularity and intelligence explosion in which mankind are entrapped in A.I-controlled society. It also investigates probable bilateral relation between dehumanization and intelligence explosion

“The Singularity is near!” Visions of Artificial Intelligence in Posthumanism and Transhumanism

Over the past 20 years, the idea of singularity has become increasingly important to the technological visions of posthumanism and transhumanism. The article first introduces key posthumanist authors such as Marvin Minsky, Ray Kurzweil, Hans Moravec, and Frank Tipler. In the following, the concept of singularity is reviewed from a cultural studies perspective, first with regard to the cosmological singularity and then to the technological singularity. According to posthumanist thinkers the singularity is marked by the emergence of a superhuman computer intelligence that will solve all of humanity’s problems. At the same time, it heralds the end of the human era. Most authors refer to the British mathematician Irving John Good’s 1965 essay Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine as the originator of the idea of superintelligence. Individual elements of the singularity idea such as the impenetrable event horizon, the frontier and the ongoing acceleration of progress are contextualized historically and culturally

Ethics of Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence (AI) is a digital technology that will be of major importance for the development of humanity in the near future. AI has raised fundamental questions about what we should do with such systems, what the systems themselves should do, what risks they involve and how we can control these. - After the background to the field (1), this article introduces the main debates (2), first on ethical issues that arise with AI systems as objects, i.e. tools made and used by humans; here, the main sections are privacy (2.1), manipulation (2.2), opacity (2.3), bias (2.4), autonomy & responsibility (2.6) and the singularity (2.7). Then we look at AI systems as subjects, i.e. when ethics is for the AI systems themselves in machine ethics (2.8.) and artificial moral agency (2.9). Finally we look at future developments and the concept of AI (3). For each section within these themes, we provide a general explanation of the ethical issues, we outline existing positions and arguments, then we analyse how this plays out with current technologies and finally what policy conse-quences may be drawn

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence

This chapter explores the evolution of artificial intelligence, starting with the first ideas of Alan Turing, going through the promises of its inception, and landing in our current state, when AI invokes a sense of power and awe. Next, the chapter will provide a summary of different technologies related to AI and machine learning, such as deep neural networks, to help the reader distinguish different terminologies. The chapter will end with a discussion of some potential tendencies concerning how AI may be used or evolve in the near future, and some questions about the technology in the long term

Groping toward the next stages of technology development and human society: a metaphor from an Iranian poet

So far, the human society has experienced four stages of development namely: Hunter–gatherer age, Agricultural age, Industrial age and Information age. Many researchers have tried to explore some scenarios to envision where human being is going in the future but the question is still unresolved and there is no unique answer. This paper aims to probe the next stages using a metaphor of an ancient Persian poem from Attar Neyshaburi (that is one of the famous Iranian poets and mystics, lived around 13th century A.D.). In this poem, Attar argues that the wayfarer must traverse seven valleys to achieve perfection. In this paper, it is hypothesised that these valleys could provide a fruitful source of vision – as a metaphor – to think about the evolution of human society. The results suggest that the next three stages which human society would experience might be: Technological convergence age, Intelligence age and Post-humanity age. These results could be helpful in providing vision for the process of technology policy design and social development