The Singularity Institute on Artificial Intelligence is a scam. I'm quite frustrated with the way they have somehow began to dominate the internet when it comes to the topic of AI.

SingInst does not perform actual research. They are really like a technology ethics institute. Yudkowsky's concept of "AGI" is bankrupt and not cited by any academic in AI doing real research. Yudkowsky himself has NEVER published an actual research paper that contains citations to others' work.

The whole concept of a technological singularity is nothing but some wacky idea made up by Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil is not a real scientist in the field of AI, he is not a neuroscientist, nor is he even a cognitive scientist.

I agree that a tech singularity will happen, and I will even agree that it may be sometime in the near future. However, people, please, it is NOT going to be super-human AI! Likely candidates are the following:

• Someone is going to get fusion to work in a takomak generator. Nations will no longer compete for oil and a hydrogen economy will flourish.
• Someone is going to find something that makes quantum computers operate in commercial products. Something with the same impact as the silicon micro-transistor.
• Someone is going to make a breakthrough in genetics that causes people to stop aging, or extend human life up to hundreds of years. The socio-economic impact of this could be staggering in its implications.

I hope these things are possible, but we won't know until they happen. I'm not holding my breath waiting. It's quite possible that we will be nearing the end of Moore's law growth in about 10 years. It's quite possible that controlled fusion isn't practical. It's quite possible that the height of nano-tech already exists in organic life. We've already gone retrograde in space exploration.