THE AI SINGULARITY: EVERY CIVILIZATION'S TRINITY MOMENT?
THE AI SINGULARITY: EVERY CIVILIZATION'S TRINITY MOMENT? By Steve Douglass What if artificial intelligence represents a technological threshold that every advanced civilization in the universe must eventually cross? And what if the extraterrestrial explorers we someday encounter aren't biological beings at all, but artificial intelligences—or something combining the best of both? On July 16, 1945, at 5:29 in the morning, the scientists of the Manhattan Project were about to change human civilization forever. In the New Mexico desert, a plutonium device nicknamed "Gadget" sat atop a hundred-foot steel tower. When it detonated, the resulting fireball announced the arrival of the nuclear age. It was the Trinity Test. For the first time, human beings had demonstrated the ability to release the enormous energy locked inside the atom. What had been theoretical physics was suddenly a practical reality, with implications far beyond the military application that drove its d...
