[ShawnJG]

while I can definitely follow the writers logic, it presupposes there is only one way to get to the singularity. If you assume that computers always need human input until we get to the singularity the writer's argument makes sense. But suppose that is not the case. When computers themselves become the majority/sole contributors to their next design cycle, the course of computer development will start to vary wildly from what humans have been attempting to do. When or if this becomes the case, you can see computers growing at a exponential rate. Where this would take us I'm not sure but I don't think would be long before computers with start exhibit intelligence beyond us. There was a comment on the host page from a person who believed it was a mistake to think that the singularity would have to come in the form of mimicking human intelligence.

"You Don't need Human Intelligence for the Singularity

Allen and Greaves are resting their argument against the singularity on two fundamental premises:

1) The human brain and human cognition are too complex to simulate without major breakthroughs in neuroscience.

2) If you can't achieve the singularity using brain simulation, algorithmic AI breakthroughs are needed, and AI progress historically has been far less than exponential.

But hidden in both of these arguments is the premise that singularity can only occur when human intelligence can be engineered. It's far more likely that the inevitable accumulation of thousands of smart objects that don't even attempt to mimic human cognition will lead to systems that have inhuman intelligence, with the ability to outperform humans on so many different tasks that the intellectual contributions of all but the most creative humans will simply be unnecessary.

I'd like to offer a different definition of the singularity: It's the point at which the productivity growth rate permanently surpasses the economic output growth rate. Once that occurs, the economy must continuously shed (human) jobs.

Today, we're shedding jobs in the developed world, and especially in the US, because our unskilled and semi-skilled labor is priced too high, sending work to the developing world, where labor is considerably cheaper. That trend won't continue forever; at some point prices come up in the developing world while they decline here, until prices meet somewhere in the middle, then slowly inflate.

But meanwhile, productivity improvements from automation are accelerating. These improvements don't require human cognition, and many of them barely require AI. (As Charles Stross recently wrote, "It's not AI if you can understand what it's doing.") These automation improvements are causing productivity to accelerate. The point where the productivity rate crosses the output rate is only years away. After that, the world is a very, very different place. Sounds like a pretty good definition for the singularity to me."