Professor David Passig at the ’World Lithuanian Economic Forum (WLEF)’:

The dawning of a new civilization

“Brain power – knowledge, skills, and human personality quirks – will combine with computer power in order to think, reason, communicate, and create in ways we can scarcely even contemplate today.”

See Professor Passig’s WLEF slideshow here: http://www.passig.com/vault/presentations/TechSingularityEng_Short.pdf

The futurist Ray Kurzweil is one of those Professor Passig refers to when explaining the theory of ‘Singularity’.

In his presentation at the World Lithuanian Economic Forum, Professor Passig also referred to the futurist Ray Kurzweil, who defines the concept of ‘Singularity’ in terms of the technological creation of superintelligence, arguing that it is difficult or impossible for present-day humans to predict what a post-singularity world would be like, due to the difficulty of imagining the intentions and capabilities of superintelligent entities.

Kurzweil believes that we're approaching a moment when computers will become intelligent, and not just intelligent but more intelligent than humans. When that happens, humanity — our bodies, our minds, our civilization — will be completely and irreversibly transformed. He believes that this moment is not only inevitable but imminent.

According to his calculations, the end of human civilization as we know it will take place around year 2045.

The Singularity is an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly nonbiological and trillions of times more powerful than it is today—the dawning of a new civilization that will enable us to transcend our biological limitations and amplify our creativity.

Technological singularity refers to the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than human intelligence. Since the capabilities of such an intelligence would be difficult for an unaided human mind to comprehend, the occurrence of technological singularity is seen as an intellectual event horizon, beyond which the future becomes difficult to understand or predict. Nevertheless, proponents of the singularity typically anticipate such an event to precede an "intelligence explosion", wherein superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds. The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes for the singularity. The concept is popularized by futurists like Ray Kurzweil and widely expected by proponents to occur in the early to mid twenty first century.
- Wikipedia