Not a good time for humanity, the ai singularity is here

[I_am_not_mafia]

I presented a paper last month at a generic AI conference. I wrote the code and paper in my spare time over the last 7 years so I could do something really new. Last time I went to that conference was 2005, 12 years ago. It was interesting because there were far fewer people this time, and that even got mentioned at the AGM. General opinion was that most people were going to machine learning conferences. Machine learning is a limited form of AI, in the same way natural language processing is. Other reasons for low attendence is the lack of funding in academia. This was a conference in the UK.

Second interesting thing that I noticed was the complete lack of progress. They were talking about exactly the same things as 12 years ago. As far as I'm concerned we haven't had much progress since the mid 90's if you exclude advances in processing power. Intel reckons going below 5nm does not make economic sense. We're currently at 14nm so forget about Moore's law continuing.

During the panel discussions about the dangers of AI, they made a lot of good points. In a hall of about 300 people, absolutely no one mentioned the hyped up ideas about singularity from media whores such as Ray Kurzweil, Sam Harris, Elon Musk or Stephen Hawking.

The singularity is not here.