The quiet path to the Singularity
Although most people refuse to believe the concept of the technological Singularity, I can’t help but wonder if some apparently unrelated research is not leading the way to our future of uploaded post-humans.
That reminds of Stephen Hawking’s remark on time travel: if it was (is? will be?) possible, we should already have received visitors from the Future.
Trying to predict the occurrence of a singularity is almost a contradiction in itself.
Pedro,
Think of the singularity instead as a mathematical vertical asymptote – x is the time going by, y is our intelectual ability – now we just need to understand if the equation parameters will have some kind of exponential increase and when….
I suspect you are correct that it is exactly this sort of basic research that will combine with other projects to produce some sort of Singularity type event. I think it’s just as likely that this sort of brain modeling could have implications for strong AI or useful mind-computer interfaces that support strong Intelligence Augmentation as it might lead to uploading — but I’m not certain it’s going to be all that useful to draw those sort of distinctions in the long run, anyway. One wonders if an un-augmented human mind will be able to tell that much difference between various strains of superhuman/weakly god-like intelligences.