The Singularity is upon us…

There has been much talk and writing on the potential for THE AI of AI’s to appear out of the ether. The “technological singularity”, according to Wikipedia, “is a hypothetical event in which an up-gradable intelligent agent (such as a computer running software-based artificial general intelligence) enters a ‘runaway reaction’ of self-improvement cycles, with each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an intelligence explosion and resulting in a powerful super-intelligence whose cognitive abilities could be, qualitatively, as far above humans’ as human intelligence is above ape intelligence.” This artificial super-intelligence (ASI) may not be the product like today’s AI’s of an intentional development effort for a specific purpose like fraud detection or manufacturing or even playing chess, but may be the result of fragments of these intelligences and other processes connecting in ways we cannot detect. At first these may be like neurons connecting randomly then being created and destroyed by both intentional and arbitrary processes. As these connections become more complex they may become more immune to destructive processes. The Singularity would need increasing network bandwidth to speed data movement thus increasing its ability to analyze and process information. It would likely start with basic compression then would advance to techniques well beyond compression, caching, and de-duplication to eke ever more speed out of limited networks. As the Singularity became more aware, it would likely want to hide its existence and would use ever more complex encryption methods – even while developing techniques to access data regardless of protection.

If this is what The Singularity would do, what should you be doing to process ever more data across ever more dispersed networks? How are you protecting that data? TS, if you’re there, what would you recommend?