Is Technological Singularity almost a reality?

Until two days ago, I was very skeptic about technological singularity. I believed in the paradox that if humans created the machines, how can they be smarter than their creators? So, computers could not even start to be smarter and cognitive work would always be done by humans. This is pretty much the same view of Frank Levy and Richard Murnane on the matter in their 2004 book “The New Division of Labor - How Computers are Creating the Next Job Market”.

In the book, they say that computers are changing work and salaries, shifting the most well paid jobs to areas focusing on expert thinking, complex communication, and non-routine tasks that involve cognitive work or where humans “still have a comparative (that is, relative) advantage”. (p. 36)

Of course I always agreed that our systems will improve and become more complex, efficient and capable with time but I didn’t think they could get to a point where they would behave as humans and evolve by their own terms and become conscious of their actions.

In this context, there would always be limitations and we are already approaching some of them if we don’t discover another means (such as is believed with quantum computing) to improve technology since thermodynamics is one of the constraints reaching limits.

I’m still skeptic but a very captive special report by IEEE caught my attention on Friday and kept me thinking about this topic. There, two articles are particularly interesting together by their antagonistic views: The first of them, by Christof Koch and Giulio Tononi, argues that yes, machines can eventually have consciousness and execute at least some cognitive work. "Consciousness is part of the natural world. It depends, we believe, only on mathematics and logic and on the imperfectly known laws of physics, chemistry, and biology; it does not arise from some magical or otherworldly quality. That's good news, because it means there's no reason why consciousness can't be reproduced in a machine—in theory, anyway."

The other article, by Alfred Nordmann, is on the other direction. For him, technology isn't evolving faster now than it was from 19th century until 1960s (he presents a timeline of some of humans' important and popular breakthroughs from 1830s onwards to exemplify this) and argues that "the story of the Singularity is sweeping, dramatic, simple—and wrong".

In the different scenarios of the report, singularity is possible (or should I say believed?) in some of them and not too far away from our present time. For me, right now, I don’t know anymore what to conclude. I need more reading and discussion time.