Zincy
In Vino Veritas
So, I was watching an AI version of Dagoth Ur from ES Morrowind rant about Midna having a fat ass when a thought dawned on me.
The intonations and inflections were almost life like, to the point where if you took of the filtering effect his voice has it would almost natural.
This got me thinking about the concept of a micro-singularity. In the study of scientific advance, there is a theory called accelerating change. This theory postulates that as technology becomes more advanced, the rate of advancement increases. Early advancement was mostly linear, but has since become exponential.
Every so often, however, we hit things called micro-singularities. These are massive, “sudden” (read, much quicker than background advances) lurches in technological growth that create such a disruption that life after them is categorically different than life before. These are not epoch changes like the move to agriculture or industrialization. Smaller scale, but still rapidly change the landscape. Think the advent of microprocessor based computers, where we went from almost a decade of transistor computers to microprocessor based ones in a fraction of the time.
I believe we are witnessing the advent of a potential micro-singularity with AI. An event that will radically alter some aspect of society. Whether it remains solely a technological disruption, or carries with in massive social changes has yet to be determined.
It also leads to a bigger question. How far away is true AI? Go back 20 years and these chatBots would probably pass the Turing Test, of course they are not (as far as we know) actually aware AI’s (gods I hope not, considering what I’ve done to a few).
But does this get us closer? Does this put AI more at the forefront of people’s minds, and thus create more social impetus to pursue it?
This is a fascinating time to be alive.