Singularity Now! The Artificial Intelligence Timeline: A reader's and investor's guide to the technological event horizon (Winter/Spring 2017) - Softcover

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(Singularity Now is a nonfiction news mash-up covering advances in artificial intelligence and other high technologies building to the singularity. This edition summarizes more than 900 articles [1000+ citations]). ... Over the last half year, a couple of trends emerged. The news daily includes innovations that reveal an already occurring and perhaps growing disruption to the job market. It reveals that no jobs are entirely safe from being vaporized by automation, robotics and AI. It reveals that AI is making inroads into the lucrative fields of lawyering, banking, insurance, and investing, pillars of the American economy and paradigm. Increasingly AI is being deployed in schools and universities to manage students and empower them with virtual tutors and tools. The news reveals always-on, always-listening natural language interfaces are increasingly finding their way onto or into gadgets, cars, appliances and homes. It reveals the major universities are deploying AI in their research to resolve some of the more bedeviling challenges facing humanity. AI is also making a splash in the healthcare sector, as it is being deployed to crunch databases, cram articles, suggest solutions, plan treatment, schedule appointments and help engineer medicines. Once relegated to the distant future, AI-empowered autonomous vehicles, drones and weapons systems are now reportedly only a few years out. Their antecedents are being deployed today on a limited scale or in testing scenarios. Other trends are emerging, specifically regarding news coverage of the sector. First, there remain a few holdouts who declare that the latest wave in AI tech won’t live up to the hype. However, they seem to be outnumbered. Second, the majority of reports that search engines favor are typically one-source, advocacy pieces that effectively give a bullhorn and soapbox to the tech makers. Third, when the implications of the advent of general AI, a nearing milestone no doubt, are discussed to any depth, the talk centers on rogue AI as an existential threat. This should indeed be discussed, no doubt. But in a way that discussion is herring from the very real and much more imminent threat of advanced AI deployed by juggernaut corporate entities, clandestine government agencies and factions, militaries or other police state and surveillance industry players in the effort to establish a total global control grid. What this illustrates is tech sector news reporters either are cynical, propagandists for the tech titans or the authorities, or can’t see the forest for the trees. Few are asking the tough questions or connecting the dots, which reveals something about the AI arms race. Without a major trend reversal, it appears that the AI arms race will be won outright by one or a consortium of the major players, or by a faction that transcends those players, and in secret (possibly under the auspices of a skunkworks project). And a clear victor in, or at least some sort of defining climax to, the AI arms race would be a milestone immediately preceding the singularity. This conclusion is discussed intermittently throughout the following. And so, regardless of your station or belief system, it is now crucial to track the course of the advance of AI, which has emerged as a lucrative market sect and a veritable virtual commodity. In the least, thanks to AI, humanity is in the midst of a paradigm shift that will perhaps radically alter the course of civilization and possibly the evolution of the species. Automated totalitarianism is emergent. As it blossoms, a clique from a breakaway civilization of proto-transhumanists will usher in the singularity, perhaps in secret. What happens after the singularity can only be the subject of speculation, both intellectual and financial. But by tracking the evolution of AI, the hypotheses target truth, and the range of possibilities is honed. ...

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