Even the largest avalanche is triggered by small things.
Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work - the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection.
Within thirty years, we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.
I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth.
IA is something that is proceeding very naturally, in most cases not even recognized by its developers for what it is.
I have argued above that we cannot prevent the Singularity, that its coming is an inevitable consequence of the humans' natural competitiveness and the possibilities inherent in technology.
We humans have millions of years of evolutionary baggage that makes us regard competition in a deadly light.
When people speak of creating superhumanly intelligent beings, they are usually imagining an AI project.
How will the approach of the Singularity spread across the human world view?
The dilemma felt by science fiction writers will be perceived in other creative endeavors.
Another symptom of progress toward the Singularity: ideas themselves should spread ever faster, and even the most radical will quickly become commonplace.
When I began writing science fiction in the middle '60s, it seemed very easy to find ideas that took decades to percolate into the cultural consciousness; now the lead time seems more like eighteen months.
And for all my rampant technological optimism, sometimes I think I'd be more comfortable if I were regarding these transcendental events from one thousand years remove... instead of twenty.
In fact, there was general agreement that minds can exist on nonbiological substrates and that algorithms are of central importance to the existence of minds.
But if the technological Singularity can happen, it will.
The physical extinction of the human race is one possibility.
But every time our ability to access information and to communicate it to others is improved, in some sense we have achieved an increase over natural intelligence.