Singularity Now! The Artificial Intelligence Timeline: Automation, robotics, tech titans, and their brave new world (March 2018)

Singularity Now! is a nonfiction news mash-up covering advances in artificial intelligence and other high technologies building to the singularity. This edition summarizes more than 275 articles [325+ citations]. Developments in high technology are advancing at a blistering rate that far outpaces anybody’s ability to fully assimilate it all into a comprehensive picture. Such a picture is not what you will find in these pages. Instead, this book series compiles summaries of news articles, columns and blogs on the technologies that will ultimately birth the technological singularity: supercomputers, artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous machines; and, perhaps to a lesser extent, augmented and virtual reality. The methodology of article selection and compilation is not scientific, and the sample size is not statistically significant. Nonetheless, almost daily throughout the month, top AI and high-tech stories are selected, condensed and encapsulated for clarity and brevity. The result is a running log of nugget paragraph entries that reflect the gist of the biggest AI stories to hit the net in the last month. The intent of this book series is not to present the current state of the technology in the public sphere, but to highlight the public discussion centered on it, to present a sampler platter of the innovations being unveiled daily, and to reveal the full extent to which these technologies are already entrenched in the gears of our civilization. This month’s headlines reveal the autonomous weapons arms race is accelerating, as is the race to normalize sex robots and personal handheld devices that constantly surveil and assess the user. Gene editing is taking off and is increasingly being pitched as a medical panacea. Cities both large and small are installing surveillance cameras; and local police agencies are increasingly soliciting citizens to register their private home surveillance systems. And increasingly, the airports of the world are becoming testing grounds for the next generation in facial recognition technology. Generally speaking, this month’s headlines reveal we continue to hurtle towards general intelligence AI, with mixed opinions, high anticipation and grave warnings of what will happen afterwards. This accomplishment, the final harbinger of the technological singularity, will be preceded by two milestones. First, the total control grid will be established. This will be complete when a sizeable stratum of the upper-middle and upper class -- meaning the MBA class, its immediate subordinates and its fellow travelers -- has almost every waking experience automatically dictated to them by high technology. The illusion of choice (such as, for example, between Coke and Pepsi or Democrat or Republican), however, will likely remain. The automated control grid will be fully mature when society is cashless. This milestone is almost within reach. Second, a sect of proto-transhumanists, first generation quasi-cyborgs and their supporters, from the breakaway civilization that is the beneficiary of the total control grid, will assume positions of covert influence, power and control. They will have the resources and manpower to make those final crucial discoveries that will foment the required climatic crescendo of innovation. And so, regardless of your station or belief system, it is now crucial to track the course of the advance of AI, which has emerged as a lucrative market sect and a veritable virtual commodity. In the least, thanks to AI, humanity is in the midst of a paradigm shift that will perhaps radically alter the course of civilization and perhaps the evolution of the species. What happens after the resulting technological singularity, after the race is complete, simply cannot be predicted or forecast. However, by tracking the evolution of AI, the hypotheses target truth, and the range of possibilities is honed. The singularity approaches. Are you ready?