Related papers: The Singularity May Be Near
The technological singularity refers to a hypothetical scenario in which technological advances virtually explode. The most popular scenario is the creation of super-intelligent algorithms that recursively create ever higher intelligences.…
There is both much optimism and pessimism around artificial intelligence (AI) today. The optimists are investing millions of dollars, and even in some cases billions of dollars into AI. The pessimists, on the other hand, predict that AI…
The development of science and technology has progressively demonstrated the ability of humankind to understand and manipulate the physical world, and it has also shown some fundamental limitations to predictability of physical events. This…
Entropy always increases monotonically in a closed system but complexity increases at first and then decreases as equilibrium is approached. Commonsense information-related definitions for entropy and complexity demonstrate that complexity…
At any time, there are areas of science where we are standing at the frontier of knowledge, and can wonder whether we have reached a fundamental limit to human understanding. What is ultimately possible in physics? I will argue here that it…
This article explores the concept of technological singularity and the factors that could accelerate or hinder its arrival. The butterfly effect is used as a framework to understand how seemingly small changes in complex systems can have…
We discuss the constraints coming from current observations of type Ia supernovae on cosmological models which allow sudden future singularities of pressure (with the scale factor and the energy density regular). We show that such a sudden…
This report seeks to inform policy makers on the nature and the merit of the arguments for and against the concerns associated with a potential technological singularity. Part I describes the lessons learned from our investigation of the…
The familiar Bang/Crunch singularities of classical cosmology have recently been augmented by new varieties: rips, sudden singularities, and so on. These tend to be associated with final states. Here we consider an alternative possibility…
We make comments on the letter by Barrow [{\it Class. Quantum Grav.} {\bf 21} (2004) L79] since we cannot observe a singularity for $p(t)$ as $t\to t_s$. Instead, there might be a singularity for $\rho(t)$ for $t\sim 0$ case.
Evidence for fine-tuning of physical parameters suitable for life can perhaps be explained by almost any combination of providence, coincidence or multiverse. A multiverse usually includes parts unobservable to us, but if the theory for it…
Even when completely and consistently formulated, a fundamental theory of physics and cosmological boundary conditions may not give unambiguous and unique predictions for the universe we observe; indeed inflation, string/M theory, and…
In recent years, a number of prominent computer scientists, along with academics in fields such as philosophy and physics, have lent credence to the notion that machines may one day become as large as humans. Many have further argued that…
After a brief review of current scenarios for the resolution and/or avoidance of the Big Bang, an alternative hypothesis is put forward implying an infinite increase in complexity towards the initial singularity. This may result in an…
Extracting predictions from cosmological theories that describe a multiverse, for what we are likely to observe in our domain, is crucial to establishing the validity of these theories. One way to extract such predictions is from…
Singularities appear in numerous important mathematical models used in Physics. And in most of such cases singularities are involved in essentially nonlinear contexts. For more than four decades, general enough nonlinear theories of…
This paper presents a plausible reasoning system to illustrate some broad issues in knowledge representation: dualities between different reasoning forms, the difficulty of unifying complementary reasoning styles, and the approximate nature…
Some of the most obviously correct physical theories - namely string theory and the multiverse - make no testable predictions, leading many to question whether we should accept something as scientific even if it makes no testable…
Singularities in general relativity and quantum field theory are often taken not only to motivate the search for a more-fundamental theory (quantum gravity, QG), but also to characterise this new theory and shape expectations of what it is…
We collect here various conjectures on congruences made by the author in a series of papers, some of which involve binary quadratic forms and other advanced theories. Part A consists of 100 unsolved conjectures of the author while…