The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical future point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable consequences for human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky is an American artificial intelligence researcher and writer on decision theory and ethics, best known for popularizing ideas related to friendly artificial intelligence, including the idea that there might not be a "fire alarm" for AI. He is the founder of and a research fellow at the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), a private research nonprofit based in Berkeley, California. His work on the prospect of a runaway intelligence explosion influenced philosopher Nick Bostrom's 2014 book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies.
Singularitarianism is a movement defined by the belief that a technological singularity—the creation of superintelligence—will likely happen in the medium future, and that deliberate action ought to be taken to ensure that the singularity benefits humans.
An artificial general intelligence (AGI) is a hypothetical type of intelligent agent. If realized, an AGI could learn to accomplish any intellectual task that human beings or animals can perform. Alternatively, AGI has been defined as an autonomous system that surpasses human capabilities in the majority of economically valuable tasks. Creating AGI is a primary goal of some artificial intelligence research and of companies such as OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic. AGI is a common topic in science fiction and futures studies.
The Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), formerly the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence (SIAI), is a non-profit research institute focused since 2005 on identifying and managing potential existential risks from artificial general intelligence. MIRI's work has focused on a friendly AI approach to system design and on predicting the rate of technology development.
Bill Hibbard is a scientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison Space Science and Engineering Center working on visualization and machine intelligence. He is principal author of the Vis5D, Cave5D, and VisAD open-source visualization systems. Vis5D was the first system to produce fully interactive animated 3D displays of time-dynamic volumetric data sets and the first open-source 3D visualization system.
Weak artificial intelligence is artificial intelligence that implements a limited part of the mind, or, as narrow AI, is focused on one narrow task. In John Searle's terms it “would be useful for testing hypotheses about minds, but would not be minds”. Weak artificial intelligence focuses on mimicking how humans perform basic actions such as remembering things, perceiving things, and solving simple problems. As opposed to strong AI, which uses technology to be able to think and learn on its own. Computers can use methods such as algorithms and prior knowledge to develop their ways of thinking as human beings do. Strong artificial intelligence systems are learning how to run independently of the programmers who programmed them. Weak AI is not able to have a mind of its own, and can only imitate physical behaviors that it can observe. It is contrasted with Strong AI, which is defined variously as:
An artificial brain is software and hardware with cognitive abilities similar to those of the animal or human brain.
Marcus Hutter is a professor and artificial intelligence researcher. A Senior Scientist at DeepMind, he is researching the mathematical foundations of artificial general intelligence. He is on leave from his professorship at the ANU College of Engineering and Computer Science of the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia. Hutter studied physics and computer science at the Technical University of Munich. In 2000 he joined Jürgen Schmidhuber's group at the Istituto Dalle Molle di Studi sull'Intelligenza Artificiale in Manno, Switzerland. He developed a mathematical theory of artificial general intelligence. His book Universal Artificial Intelligence: Sequential Decisions Based on Algorithmic Probability was published by Springer in 2005.
In computer science, termination analysis is program analysis which attempts to determine whether the evaluation of a given program halts for each input. This means to determine whether the input program computes a total function.
Ben Goertzel is a computer scientist, artificial intelligence researcher, and businessman. He helped popularize the term 'artificial general intelligence'.
A probabilistic logic network (PLN) is a conceptual, mathematical and computational approach to uncertain inference; inspired by logic programming, but using probabilities in place of crisp (true/false) truth values, and fractional uncertainty in place of crisp known/unknown values. In order to carry out effective reasoning in real-world circumstances, artificial intelligence software must robustly handle uncertainty. However, previous approaches to uncertain inference do not have the breadth of scope required to provide an integrated treatment of the disparate forms of cognitively critical uncertainty as they manifest themselves within the various forms of pragmatic inference. Going beyond prior probabilistic approaches to uncertain inference, PLN is able to encompass within uncertain logic such ideas as induction, abduction, analogy, fuzziness and speculation, and reasoning about time and causality.
OpenCog is a project that aims to build an open source artificial intelligence framework. OpenCog Prime is an architecture for robot and virtual embodied cognition that defines a set of interacting components designed to give rise to human-equivalent artificial general intelligence (AGI) as an emergent phenomenon of the whole system. OpenCog Prime's design is primarily the work of Ben Goertzel while the OpenCog framework is intended as a generic framework for broad-based AGI research. Research utilizing OpenCog has been published in journals and presented at conferences and workshops including the annual Conference on Artificial General Intelligence. OpenCog is released under the terms of the GNU Affero General Public License.
SmartAction provides artificial intelligence-based voice self-service. IVA is a cloud-based, hosted service. The company was founded by inventor and entrepreneur Peter Voss and is headquartered in El Segundo, California.
In formal language theory, a growing context-sensitive grammar is a context-sensitive grammar in which the productions increase the length of the sentences being generated. These grammars are thus noncontracting and context-sensitive. A growing context-sensitive language is a context-sensitive language generated by these grammars.
Hypothetical technology is technology that does not exist yet, but that could exist in the future. This article presents examples of technologies that have been hypothesized or proposed, but that have not been developed yet. An example of hypothetical technology is teleportation.
Jean-Pierre Jouannaud is a French computer scientist, known for his work in the area of term rewriting.
Nachum Dershowitz is an Israeli computer scientist, known e.g. for the Dershowitz–Manna ordering and the multiset path ordering used to prove termination of term rewrite systems.
Wayne Snyder is an associate professor at Boston University known for his work in E-unification theory.
Tobias Nipkow is a German computer scientist.
