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 AI scientists want to make gods. Shouldthat worry us?Singularitarians believe artificial intelligence will be humanity'ssaviour. But they also assume AI entities will be benevolent

 Wendy M Grossman

guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 2 November 2011 05.00 EDT

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The singularity, a term borrowed from the point of discontinuity in black holes, is the moment at which AI passes

human intelligence. Photograph: Nasa/Reuters

The science fiction writer and physicist, Vernor Vinge, borrowed the term "singularity"from the point of discontinuity in phenomena such as black holes and applied it to the

creation of artificial intelligence. The singularity is the moment at which artificial

intelligence passes human intelligence – and after that nothing, Vinge told Nasa in

1993, is predictable. For those who believe this prediction, the question is not if but

 when.

 Vinge himself expected the singularity to happen between 2005 and 2030. No one

thinks we're particularly close yet, IBM's Jeopardy and chess champions

notwithstanding. Vinge's ideas have been taken up by a number of others, most notably 

inventor and engineer Ray Kurzweil, who for many years has put the date of the

singularity at 2045 and the date when machine intelligence passes the Turing test – thatis, convinces a human judge it's human – at 2029.

Science is not a belief system but a process for arriving at the truth. Predictions about

 where technological development is taking us are different: they can be falsified but it

takes time, and in the meantime others feel free to call you a crackpot.

 And many do. One of Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod's characters once

described the singularity as "the rapture for nerds". The late John McCarthy, the "father

of AI", called it, simply, "nonsense", and expressed the hope of living to 102 so he could

laugh at Kurzweil in 2029. Singularitarians have been known to counter that when an

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elderly scientist says something is impossible, he is usually wrong. Maybe: but

McCarthy knew better than anyone the difficulties of creating and programming AI.

Some of my resistance is personal. Alongside serious researchers into machine

intelligence, such as IBM's Jeopardy team and Stephen Wolfram, you have Sonia

 Arrison expounding her book 100 Plus and John Mauldin declaiming, Texas preacher-

style, on how to survive the bursting of the bubble of government debt (read his books

and investment newsletter, apparently).

Listening to these folks, you would never know that the face of extreme old age is

overwhelmingly poor, disabled and female. Arrison held out the hope – or nightmare –

of becoming a first-time mother at 70, and claimed that innovation is a "late-peak field",

something most mathematicians and physicists would violently disagree with.

Even Kurzweil, undeniably respected for inventing the first optical character recognition

software and in many ways the father of this movement, comes across as fuelled by 

 belief more than science. Every year, he painstakingly updates his graphs to show that

 we're right on course for 2045; Wikipedia tracks his accuracy rate.

This year Kurzweil's talk focused on Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen's counter-

arguments. Among other things, Allen complained that Kurzweil's "law of accelerating

returns" is not an immutable physical law. No, agreed Kurzweil, but "lots of scientific

laws are not physical laws, just observations". And he mentioned the law of gravity.

Hackles up, immediately: unlike faster processors, humans do not create gravity. There

is no comparison. Nor is it easy to listen to his claim that worldwide the standard of 

living continues to increase; in his world is no one occupying Wall Street?

The science fiction writer David Brin told last month's sixth annual singularity summit:

"So you want to make gods. Now, why would that bother anybody?" The audience might

not have taken this joke so well from anybody they admired less.

Singularitarians often come across as cult-like and defensive. It doesn't help that so

many see the artificial general intelligences (AGIs) they want to build as the solution to

everything from climate change, radical life extension, immortality and colonising spaceto finding new energy sources. Immortality, gods, wealth, health, universal democracy 

… aren't these the horizons that every generation has chased since time immemorial?

My favourite was Tyler Cowen's hope: an AI (just call it Cyrano?) in your pocket to buzz

 you to stop talking too much on a first date.

This is where believing in the singularity is no different from belief in any other type of 

 benevolent intelligence watching over us – gods, extraterrestrials, fairies or royalty. But

suppose we do in fact build one? The reality might not be benevolent. The

singularitarians may be in the position of the plummeting whale in The Hitchhiker's

Guide to the Galaxy, who sees the ground rushing towards him and wonders if it will be

friends with him.