HUMAN–MACHINE SINGULARITY

CARLOS SILVA – 7500

ABSTRACTMACHINE

SUMMARY

SINGULARITY“[...] the nature of human life as it would exist past the point when machine and human cognition blurred”.

CONCEPT

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“In from three to eight years we will have a machine with general intelligence of an average human being.”

– Joseph Weizenbaum, Meet Shakey, the First Electronic Person

“These abstract machines are mathematical fictions rather than physical objects. By definition they are incapable of errors of functioning. In this sense we can truly say that machines can never make mistakes”.

Technological evolution is a requirement for human evolution. For the man to understand himself, the machine must understand the man, his behaviours, his ways of thinking, his own language.

As the ever-growing machine paves ground for groundbreaking discoveries for the man, the distinguishable gap between man’s cognition of the world around him and the machine’s will no longer be clear.

The epoch of human nature will then only arrive at a singular notion of intelligence – the machine and the man as one in the same.

CONCEPT

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The abstract machine model allows the creation of computational problem-solving programs applied to the real-life context with precision.

TURINGMACHINE

“Turing’s paper was important not just in describing a thinking machine, but in describing an essentially linguistic computer that could converse fluidly”.

CONCEPT

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The Turing Machine by Alan Turing

The first fully-realizated universal abstract machine capable of decyphering algorithm-encrypted messages at the time of 1936.

HYPERTEXT“[...] a body of written or pictorial material interconnected in such a complex way that it could not conveniently be presented or represented on paper”.

CONCEPT

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The Hypertext Editing System [HES] – A hypertext research project conducted at Brown University in 1967.

METAFICTION“In all fictional works, each time a man is confronted with several alternatives, he chooses one and eliminates the others; in the fiction of Ts’ui Pên, he chooses simultaneously all of them”.

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Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Pale Fire’ novel features a self-aware narrative which focuses on and plays with the literary structure itself.

LEARNINGMACHINE

“One could say that a man can inject an idea into the machine, and that it will respond to a certain extent and then drop into quiescence”.

CONCEPT

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‘ELIZA’, an early natural language computer program created in 1966 at MIT which could respond and react to the user’s input with certain resemblance to human language.

CONCEPT

HYPERTEXTFICTION

“This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time”.

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Michael Joyce’s ‘Afternoon, A Story’ was one of the first implementationsof an interactive, branching novel that escapes the conventional linear literary structure.

CONCEPT

Turing, Alan. 1950. ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’. Mind.

Borges, Jorge L. 1964. ‘Labyrinths: Selected Stories & Other Writings’. New Directions.

Kurzweil, Ray. 2005.‘The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology’. Viking.

REFERENCE