I have a graduate degree in robotics, and I think that robots will be as capable as humans within a few decades. I also think it is likely we can engineer a solution to aging, but I'm not as familiar with the tech there.

No doubt. It isn't the first singularity movie anyway; Terminator, Matrix, Eagle Eye, A Space Odyssey..

I wouldn't call those singularity movies.

Maybe movies with transhuman/posthuman themes, but the singularity implies things about the rate of technological progress - certainly there wasn't much rapid progress in Terminator after the machines nuked the earth (except, maybe, in the production of new terminator robots, but even that wasn't fast, really).

Eagle Eye was a singularity movie in potential, but in essence it was no different than War Games in that it was about a rampant AI with no progression beyond. I, Robot had a far greater display of the advance of technology than virtually any Sci-Fi movie (except maybe the bicentennial man) and only displayed ~3 generations of robots (the replaced, the being replaced and the new) but is in no sense a singularity movie.

I doubt we'll ever see a movie truly depict the singularity in any way other than a glimpse and will be akin to virtually any sci-fi movie in any setting. We might get there with a great TV series, but that's doubtful.

IMO a singularity TV series would have to take the story progression of Taken in the generation skipping, but instead of giant leaps, it would be a leap of decades, years and then months as technology advances up to the '2030' mark.

For movies we'll be stuck with a BS intro that pails in comparison to the introduction of each Fallout game but will inevitably be describing similar events.

None of those present god (little g) level AI being created by humans but, AI (2001) is fairly close to the idea. By the end of the movie the robots knew how to bring someone back from the dead for a day and who knows what else.

> does anyone with a real technical background... this believe this stuff?

Why not?

There are a large number of assumptions built up around the singularity concept and CPU's are not getting exponentially faster so at least one of them seems incorrect. Honestly, the hardest problem IMO is the idea that intelligence is fungible and twice as much of it will provide anywhere near twice the result. The real world is fuzzy and thinking faster/deeper only get’s you so far.

Let's say we can build a machine smarter than a single person, that’s a long way from building something smarter than humanity so there is not a quick kick off to infinity. Now let's suggest we build a billion of the things and they are all smarter than the average person. Nothing says you can get anything close to a linear feedback between the intelligence designing an AI and how smart the AI is so there would not necessarily be a feedback loop to keep making more intelligent systems. etc.

When talking about about computation the argument is usually presented as exponential increase in processor computational power (FLOPs/MIPs) per unit cost not processor speed. Even though processor speed peaked recently computational power per unit cost has continued to increase.

Economics drives an increase in computation per unit cost not processor speed. How the increase in accomplished is irrelevant.

The current peak in processor speed may also be temporary as you can see with a quick google search. http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=1G1...

You do know Moore's law, don't you?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moores_law

Aside from that, the difference between one human and all of us is only 2^32 - so if you can place the intelligence of one human on a chip, you'll be able to do the same thing with all of humanity 64 years later. And that's ignoring things like reduced costs per chip / using multiple chips for the same price.

You do know that it is not a Law, right? It should be called, Moore's Rule of Thumb.

not to mention resource/energy limitations

Well first of all, we all know the limitations of exponential growth in the real world. What does 'enhancing capability and intelligence to an unimaginable scale' really mean? It all strikes me as uselessly fuzzy and mystical. Good for pop 'science' articles and sci-fi speculation (which, don't get me wrong, is fun in and of itself) but not terribly useful or informative otherwise.

Define "this stuff" - what, specifically, are you snorting at people believing?

'this stuff' := The Singularity - The idea that we will be able to design systems with enough 'intelligence' (a difficult term to define itself) as to be imbued with novel creativity that surpasses all human understanding...in turn, these systems create ever more advanced creative systems until (insert your dis/utopian idea of preference here).

Especially the part where they say it all happens in ~30 years from now. Eh?

Eliezer Yudkowsky.