[ExI] Will the Singularity take an unexpected path?

[spike]

> BillK wrote:
> > <http://www.ecs.soton.ac.uk/about/news/1418>
> >
> > An AI professor in the UK has made a presentation that sounded unusual
> > to me.  He sees narrow AI proliferating wildly, until we are
> > surrounded by thousands of invisible helpers, all doing their own tiny
> > process.
...
> > This is a form of human augmentation that I haven't heard before.
> > More like augmenting the environment around humans, so that the matter
> > around us is gradually becoming intelligent.  Quite a thought.
> > Hmmmmm...


Bill this sounds reasonable to me because it is easier to imagine the
driving factor.  There is commercial interest in specific AI-like
applications, but no real market force driving general AI.  The canonical
example would be chess software and the current ability to wear a hidden
computer to play grandmaster level chess.  There is enormous market
incentive for both of those things, so we have them.  

I used the term AI-like because a chess program is not AI.  Any program that
is sold as AI is no longer AI as soon as it actually works.  If we bundle a
couple hundred or a couple thousand specific applications like chess, in a
software package, it will begin to gradually resemble general AI.  It won't
be that of course, but it will begin to look like general AI.

spike