[ExI] 23andSingularity

[spike]

OK, I admit to obsessing over this whole 23 business.  So sue me.

If we give a computer a clear and narrowly defined goal, software can mimic
human intelligence, in that one narrow area.  The classic example is chess.

It occurred to me that we could program something like a will to figure out
an enormous but very specific question: how are all the carbon units on
23andMe related?

We have a number of techniques we can use, similar to the ones I had: a
young lady contacted me with only her name and her father's name.  From that
I was able to go to her facebook page, verify that her photo there matched
the photo on her 23andMe page, so I know I had the right person, from that
get her birth date and place, compare my ancestry to hers to get the
intersection, go into my relatives looking for existing family trees in soft
copy on Ancestry dot com, trace branched downward until I found a name that
matches the one she supplied for her father, go to Spokeo and see that one
of his past addresses is a small town where she was born.

There is not one step anywhere above that couldn't be done with computer
code.  If we set scripts to run tirelessly searching using these various
techniques, I have no doubt we could accumulate enormous databases in such a
way that the computer code just keeps getting smarter and smarter, until it
is way better than human counterparts, just as computers can play better
chess than any human now.  It would represent a kind of nano-singularity, a
tiny slice of human existence in which code came along and was taught our
ways of finding these sorts of things, then it just started doing it and
accumulating more and more data, with error checking and verification, and
with each verified link, the system became stronger, since it can now use
those links to find others, until one day it surpasses every human.  Then in
that one tiny nano-slice of life, we could claim that a singularity of sorts
has occurred.  

We might not even be able to figure out how the code discovered the genetic
links: it was given a goal to find them, along with a bucket of techniques
like what I did in the fourth paragraph, and off it went.  Then most people
on the planet, or rather most westerners, could just give it a DNA sample
and it could hand you back your entire genome history map, including all
anomalies, within minutes.

Oooh my, is this cool, or what?

spike