The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

For example, in October 2014 Tomaso Poggio, an MIT expert on AI and cognitive science, said, “The ability to describe the content of an image would be one of the most intellectually challenging things of all for a machine to do. We will need another cycle of basic research to solve this kind of question.”[14] Poggio estimated that this breakthrough was at least two decades away. The very next month, Google debuted object recognition AI that could do just that. When The New Yorker’s Raffi Khatchadourian asked him about this, Poggio retreated to a more philosophical skepticism about whether this ability represented true intelligence. I point this out not as a criticism of Poggio but rather as an observation of a tendency we all share. Namely, before AI achieves some goal, that goal seems extremely difficult and singularly human. But after AI reaches it, the accomplishment diminishes in our human eyes.