According to futurist Ray Kurzweil the Singularity is due to arrive sooner than predicted by the original estimates.
From Elon Musk to Larry Page, the head of Google’s Deep Mind, all have warned the world that artificial intelligence will outdo human intelligence within decades. This kind of event is known in the literature as the AI singularity.
Big Tech, academia and governments around the world have begun strategising over what this hypothetical scenario might look like. Although there has been a lot of analysis on the possibility of a violent takeover by artificial intelligence few studies have explored how a machine can monopolize the world economy.
The singularity:
Futurist Ray Kurzweil, a former Google researcher considered a luminary in the technology field, recently published a book entitled The Singularity Is Nearer: In the integration of the ‘self’ with artificial intelligence. As in the book bridging to the present, he explained what he has said about our future which he says is a future of the second-smartest beings in the earth.
Kurzweil for instance seems to have slightly different ideas about what is known as the singularity from the general scientific perspective. I say other than that, the singularity is, as mentioned earlier, simply another point of inflexion at which an AI model is demonstrably better in reasoning than human beings. , in the opinion of Kurzweil, we will achieve this goal around the year 2029 when the so- called “artificial general intelligence” (AGI) is going to be created.
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By this definition, AGI, would be any machine that is able to do any thing that an average man can do provided with the right tools and instrument.
However, the end of man will happen in the 2040s when man and machine interface to create a super human – this is the singularity. According to the futurist this will result to near immortality, no sickness, and an ultimate human paradise.
This article focuses on the general interpretation of the AI singularity: a hypothetical line, that is not currently feasible, beyond which an AI model is provably better at reasoning tasks than any human.
AI overlords
Tons of students, teachers, writers and politicians already discussed whether the singularity could result in human obliteration. In most cases, the AI creates robots with the aim of exterminating mankind and then reshape the earth in line with what the AI imagines. Some have the machines using brute force and hence dominate humans for a particular reason or the other.
Most of these fears fit into a threat category called misalignment, where, no matter how hard scientists try, the machines become self-willed and don’t do what they are programmed for.
All this is good for science fiction, though with all the efforts involved here, even an individual superintelligent AI hive-mind is likely to be overwhelmed. For instance, equipping buildings with the capacity to suit and dismantle enough destructive equipment to annihilate eight billion humans without also dismantling the infrastructure that supports the running of the machines is a planing affair.
A more feasible scenario could involve a machine takeover that doesn’t result in spilling a single drop of human blood: take up a large portion of the market of finance. Fortunately or unfortunately for all the possible C.I.A’s wanting to take over the world, even the smartest system in the world will have a hard time cracking the traditional banking system.
In the case the theoretical AI takeover happens before the advance in quantum computing produce machines capable of cracking RSA encryption, not even an AGI created from all the physical supercomputers on the face of the earth networked together can hack into banks, in the event of proper encryption.
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Final boss whale
In the technological aspect, however, there is nothing that will prevent a superintelligent-round-the clock trader who can make millions of trades synchronously across all accessible cryptos and blockchains from seizing the whole crypto-market.
When people are busy doing mundane activities such as sleeping or going to the bathroom, the superrich superintelligent AI could be flooding the cryptocurrency, NFT, Web3 and online gambling spaces with millions of bots doing optimized, math-based earning programs.
Besides, it would be impossible to know whether such an AI could successfully penetrate all the networks. But based on how 100’s of millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrencies fluctuations occur due to the large ‘whale’ transactions, it means that a superintelligence machine may build a large treasure of cryptocurrency in a short span of time.
If we assume that the AI would use only a reactionary trading strategy and we take only the top 10 cryptocurrencies by market capitalization and then sum up all the wallets across as many networks as possible, the upper limit on the machine’s wallet as at aug 25, would be close to $2 trillion.
Taking into account that this superintelligent AI does not even steal from people nor takes money from banks directly in this hypothetical, it’d hypothetically accumulate enough capital to invest in the world market of stock kinds.