Good news! It’s gonna be a while before the robots take over the world

Bruce Sterling, of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, says the Singularity (“in which superhuman intelligence abruptly ends the human era”) is a looong way off. (phew)

It’s just not happening. All the symptoms are absent. Computer hardware is not accelerating on any exponential runway beyond all hope of control. We’re no closer to “self-aware” machines than we were in the remote 1960s. Modern wireless devices in a modern Cloud are an entirely different cyber-paradigm than imaginary 1990s “minds on nonbiological substrates” that might allegedly have the “computational power of a human brain.” A Singularity has no business model, no major power group in our society is interested in provoking one, nobody who matters sees any reason to create one, there’s no there there.

Unless it’s already happening and that’s just what the robots want us to think…

Here is what you should be worried about.

via the Dish

January 22, 2013