Exponential growth requires the exponential consumption of resources (matter, energy, and time), and there are always limits to this. Why should we think intelligent machines would be different? We will build machines that are more ‘intelligent’ than humans, and this might happen quickly, but there will be no singularity, no runaway growth in intelligence. There will be no single godlike intelligent machine. Like today’s computers, intelligent machines will come in many shapes and sizes and be applied to many different types of problems.
”Intelligent machines need not be anything like humans, emotionally and physically. An extremely intelligent machine need not have any of the emotions a human has, unless we go out of our way to make it so. No intelligent machine will ‘wake up’ one day and say ‘I think I will enslave my creators.’ Similar fears were expressed when the steam engine was invented. It won’t happen. The age of intelligent machines is starting. Like all previous technical revolutions, it will accelerate as more and more people work on it and as the technology improves. There will be no singularity or point in time where the technology itself runs away from us.
Martine Rothblatt on Techno-Immortality:
Lingering objections to mindclones based upon inexactitude simply misunderstand the nature of identity. Identity is a property of continuity. This means that a person’s identity can exist to a greater or lesser extent depending upon the presence or absence of its constituents. We believe that we have the same identity as we grow from teenagers to adults because to a great extent our mannerisms, personality, recollections, feelings, beliefs, attitudes and values have been continually present over those years. Of course we have changed, but the changes are on top of bedrock constancy. For the same reason it is not necessary for our mindclone to share every memory with its biological original to have the same identity as that original.
The problem I have is that what we’re really talking about is a copy made of your mind prior to your physical death. Sure, this copy may outlive your ‘first’ mind for millennia to come, but your ‘first’ mind still must die with your body. That mind retains its sense of self and personhood, so there really is no escaping death. You still will die, and will experience death. Given that nobody truly knows what that experience entails beyond the physical experience, it would be foolish to assume that creating a copy is enabling immortality, or at the least, the avoidance of death.
