Kingston Philosophy Café

At 19:30 Peter Clark will lead a discussion on the threat posed by a Technological Singularity, an idea popularised by Ray Kurzweil.

In his 2005 book "The Singularity is Near" Kurzweil describes his law of accelerating returns which predicts an exponential increase in technologies like computers, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics and artificial intelligence. Once the Singularity has been reached, Kurzweil says that machine intelligence will be infinitely more powerful than all human intelligence combined. Afterwards he predicts intelligence will radiate outward from the planet until it saturates the universe. The Singularity is also the point at which machines intelligence and humans would merge.