Popular Mechanics has coverage of Singularity Summit. Slightly weird coverage, but, uh, whatever. Being exposed to the idea of the Singularity since 2001, I consider it normal and boring (even annoying) rather than weird or fantastic. Homo sapiens surpassed lesser intelligences — why is it such a shocker than Homo sapiens will eventually be surpassed intellectually? I guess it is the hard takeoff version that inspires evaluations of weirdness. Well, if it were physically impossible to develop manufacturing and robotics technology vastly more powerful than human beings, then there would be no hard takeoff, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Humans are midway on the “Great Chain of Being”, which makes sense given that we should expect ourselves to be “typical” intelligences for anthropic reasons.

Quote:

You can see how believable and even plausible a technological singularity seems once you take a few things for granted. If it were possible to improve your memory with a digital device, for example, then everybody would want one, because not having such a device would put you at a disadvantage to those who had such technology. Then an escalation of biodigital enhancement would naturally occur until some people were walking around with more microchips than neurons. At some point the hand off between human intelligence and machine intelligence would have occurred. And that’s just one possible singularity scenario.

Um, duh?