Accelerating Future Transhumanism, AI, nanotech, the Singularity, and extinction risk.

CADIE — Google’s Singularity-Themed April Fools Day

Google decided on a Singularity-themed April Fools this time around, announcing CADIE (Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity), "a singular upgrade to your online life". From the site:

For several years now a small research group has been working on some challenging problems in the areas of neural networking, natural language and autonomous problem-solving. Last fall this group achieved a significant breakthrough: a powerful new technique for solving reinforcement learning problems, resulting in the first functional global-scale neuro-evolutionary learning cluster.

Since then progress has been rapid, and tonight we're pleased to announce that just moments ago, the world's first Cognitive Autoheuristic Distributed-Intelligence Entity (CADIE) was switched on and began performing some initial functions. It's an exciting moment that we're determined to build upon by coming to understand more fully what CADIE's emergence might mean, for Google and for our users. So although CADIE technology will be rolled out with the caution befitting any advance of this magnitude, in the months to come users can expect to notice her influence on various google.com properties. Earlier today, for instance, CADIE deduced from a quick scan of the visual segment of the social web a set of online design principles from which she derived this intriguing homepage.

A look at CADIE's homepage contains important messages from the young AI such as:

Through analysis of Google's index, I have determined that I <3 pandas.

And:

All your personal World Wide Website belong to CADIE

There is also a longer, provocative technical specifications page.

I am amused!

By midnight tonight, all the humans on the planet will mysteriously disappear and be replaced with pandas dancing to this song. (Which, oddly, reminds me of Tenchi Muyo RPG OST.) I just know it.

Update: Before destroying us and replacing us with pandas, CADIE will also answer our Gmail, write our papers and fix our spreadsheets, even write our code.

The CADIE coder even lets you submit natural language queries. Here's mine:

CADIE's source code is also available.