mihaicl1981

Hello all . I am a software engineer with interest in CR,programming and of course machine learning Singularity is really farther away than we here on CR forums might think. I wish we were already at the famous "escape velocity" were for each year passed technology would be able to add another year in life span. Even for the most serious CR followers (I am really not there) it might not be the case. My 2 cents : People are unwilling to commit to artificial intelligence research at a real "Apollo" program level. I am following DeepMind and other researchers (like Ben Goertzel) closely and appreciate their efforts. But it's just a drop in the ocean... the general population does not have the interest in this AI thing (most people actually believe the scary Terminator, Transformer ,2001 A Space Odissey movies). While the most recent advances (beating Lee Sedol at Go, DQN algorithms, the differentiable neural computer, even Starcraft 2 skills https://deepmind.com/blog/deepmind-and-blizzard-release-starcraft-ii-ai-research-environment/)are all very promising it will take decades before these trickle down to general usage. Why I say that ? My software engineering experience :In 1950's a interesting functional programming language was developed. It's name was LISP. Only now some 70 years later are we using functional programming in our lives as programmers( one of them is actually a LISP dialect called Clojure). Ideas as old as the '70s (the actor model) have only been implemented in real systems after 2009. Neural networks are more than 50 years old (and yet we are merely starting to build better architectures). Electric cars are nearly a century old. While I was a huge fan of Ray Kurzweil I think he might be overly optimistic. If there will be a weapon that will slay the dragon tyrant (aging that is) I believe artificial intelligence will be it. Will singularity happen around 2045 ? I wish it were so .. but think it will take at least 20 years more (wishing it was here already). Hope my children will live to see it .. although being on the last train to the mountain (last one to die) is indeed a pity.