500 years ago, it took only about 100 years for the printing press to be widely used, and today, a product such as mobile phones and the World Wide Web, from invention to widespread use, only takes a few years.

In such a situation, not to mention us ordinary people, even scientists often underestimate the power of exponential growth.

For example, when the Human Genome Project was launched in 1990, some scientists believed that at that rate, it would take at least 100 years to complete the project.

However, the results were surprisingly fast, and by 2003 all the sequencing had been completed.

And everyone is very familiar with the computer field, speaking of which everyone may not believe it, after just 50 years, the calculator capacity of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which has burned countless dollars, is not as strong as the convenient calculator of more than a dozen dollars today.

The computing power of an iPhone is hundreds of millions of times that of the Apollo 11 lunar navigation calculator.

In the future, it's very likely that because you've slept in bed all day, the world may have grown to a point that you can't comprehend the next day.

Kurzweil thinks that the limit of growth will appear in 2045, when the tangent of the function of technological growth will be almost vertical, and every moment of technological progress may exceed the sum of all past achievements.

Can you imagine what will happen in the world in the hours after the arrival of the technological singularity? I can't imagine it anyway.

One thing is for sure, AI will bring us to the technological singularity.

So the question arises again, what technology will lead us to the technological singularity? Some people think it's a quantum computer, while others think it's controlled nuclear fusion technology.

But Kurzweil thinks it's artificial intelligence that opens the door, because he thinks that the technology of the future will develop to a point where we humans can't understand it.

Artificial intelligence can have a faster thinking speed than humans, let alone be as smart as humans, and in Kurzweil's view, the future AI will definitely far surpass the intelligence of today's humans, and truly become a god of knowledge.

Of course, this is not a rhetorical statement, and Kurzweil has given his reasons.

First of all, the technology of artificial intelligence is growing rapidly, because the information technology represented by artificial intelligence is the closest to the exponential growth model, and it can endlessly improve its knowledge level through learning, and in a short period of time, the perception of the world can be updated several versions.

Secondly, they "think" very quickly, machines can process and convert signals at a speed close to the speed of light, while the speed of signal transmission in the mammalian brain is 100s, which is 3 million times slower than that of machines.

And artificial intelligence is malleable, that is, it has the ability to change structure, while the architecture of the human brain has its own biological limitations.

In addition, artificial intelligence can also quickly share resources, and I don't know how high the efficiency of human language and writing is.

Therefore, after the arrival of the technological singularity, only the scholar of artificial intelligence may be able to understand knowledge beyond human reason.

At that time, the wisdom of artificial intelligence was comparable to that of humans, which is why some people finally said that strong artificial intelligence would be the last invention of human beings, and the subsequent civilization would be continued by artificial intelligence.

Although information technology, represented by artificial intelligence, is one of the keys to achieving the technological singularity, Kurzweil does not believe that information technology is the only protagonist in the future.

The protagonist of the future should be the GNR revolution with the triple superposition of G (gene technology), N (nanotechnology) and R (robotics).

With the help of these technologies, humans can transcend biological limitations, be edited like programs, and constantly transform themselves, so as to completely integrate with AI.

Something like a brain-computer interface, consciousness uploading, and so on, so as to achieve the immortal state of consciousness, and at that time, it is to completely liberate our minds from the strict limitations of biological forms, which is a fundamental spiritual undertaking.

Of course, for us humans, carbon-based life, the world after the technological singularity is no longer understandable to us mortals.

Of course, there are still a lot of anti-arguments on the Internet.

Will we have eternal life in 25 years? Will artificial intelligence become our savior out of the flesh? Even if I had written this to answer this question, and even if I had stepped out of Amejian's airport, I would still be skeptical of Kurzweil's theory of the technological singularity.

Even if I am dead and nailed to the coffin, I will be in the grave, shouting with this rotten voice: Something is wrong with you!

Anyone who has studied economics may have heard of the Malthusian trap, which means that food production increases linearly, but population growth is exponential, and when there is an overpopulation, wars and famines are often born to eliminate those who are overcrowded.

And the production of food is the ceiling of population growth.

Therefore, some economists use Kuzweil's theory to think that technology, like population, cannot develop in the form of exponential explosion, because the intelligence of artificial intelligence has no limit, which means that the energy consumed is also unlimited, which is very unreasonable.

And maybe the development of technology is not exponential, but Y+Artanx, and we are just in the middle stage of the fastest development.

Some people also believe that the development of science and technology is not as fast as imagined, even the field of information technology mentioned by Kurzweil has encountered a bottleneck in development, I don't believe you see how long Moore's law has been invalid, and the major chip manufacturers have changed their names to toothpaste factories.

And human beings don't know enough about neuroscience, and they don't even understand the principles of the human brain, and they still want to directly design strong artificial intelligence and engage in consciousness uploading?

But then again, this is not the first time that Kurzweil has engaged in this kind of language about the future, after all, the name of the future scientist is not called for nothing.

As early as 1990, Kurzweil made predictions that seemed sensational at the time, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union, the expansion of the Internet, the computer will beat the world champion, translation software can translate in real time, and voice assistants who can understand human speech will appear (similar to Siri, Xiao Ai, etc.)