By Casey Luskin

Artificial intelligence (AI) has come a long way — even in just the past year since the Discovery Institute hosted our previous COSM conference. After a recent explosion of impressive AI-based “chatbots,” BBC’s Science Focus declared that “2023 is the year of artificial intelligence, with AI chatbots emerging as indispensable tools for businesses, individuals, and organisations worldwide.”

Thus, COSM 2023, held in Bellevue, WA, offered an ideal moment to host speaker Ray Kurzweil, a computer scientist, futurist, top Google engineer, and arguably the greatest prophet of AI to ever span the mainstream academic and tech worlds.

Future Forecast

According to Kurzweil, what we’ve seen so far from AI ain’t nothin’. During his lecture at COSM on Thursday, November 2, Kurzweil repeated forecasts he has made elsewhere that by 2029 AI will pass the Turing test, and by 2045 it will reach a “singularity.” If you’re not familiar with AI, both concepts probably require a little explaining.

The “Turing test,” was developed by Alan Turing, the famous British computer scientist and World War II codebreaker depicted by Benedict Cumberbatch in the Academy Award-winning movie The Imitation Game.

In 1950, Turing proposed that we could say that computers had effectively achieved humanlike intelligence when a human investigator could not distinguish the performance of a computer from that of a human being. The test has seen many variations and criticisms over the years, but it remains the gold standard for evaluating whether we have created true AI.

At COSM, Kurzweil predicted that this will happen in just a few years, and once AI reaches such a “general human capability” in 2029, it will have already “surpassed us in every way.” But he isn’t worried, because we humans are “not going to be left behind.” Instead, humans and AI are “going to move into the future together.”

Go here to read the rest of “Ray Kurzweil Predicts: The ‘Singularity’ by 2045.

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