The Technological Singularity

by Murray Shanahan

In the story of the motorbike designers, the team of AIs has an enormous competitive advantage over their human rivals simply by working very fast. If the AIs in question were brain-like, this would amount to their operating in faster than real time. This is the simplest and most obvious way to exploit the liberation from biological constraints that results from migration to a computational substrate. But the migration from biology opens up many more possibilities for enhancing the capabilities of brain-inspired artificial intelligence. Consider all the ways in which human workers are hampered by their animal nature. Humans need to eat, for example, and to sleep. But even a biologically highly realistic whole brain emulation—a faithful synthetic copy of a specific brain—could to a large extent be relieved of these needs. While real brains require a blood supply to provide energy, in the form of glucose, to enable neurons to function, a simulated brain has no such requirements, at least not at the level of the simulation.