I believe when the singularity hits, it won't be in the idea of a smarter machine making smarter machines.
It will be in decreasing communication lag-time and interoperability between /people/ asymptotically to nil.
We will still be individuals, but we will be tied inexorably to not only each other, but the vast amount of data stored on the internet.
What makes us /think/ better, however, is speed and utility of communication. What helps us /remember/ better is the speed and utility of information retrieval.
The latter has been increasing faster than the former. We need fundamentally gigantic changes in human-computer-human communication to affect the former. The first of these was the internet, of course. What we've been doing with it since its inception are comparative baby-steps - someday, perhaps soon, there will be a leap just as big as the Internet is.
And it will be fundamentally destabilizing to everything we know as society today.
It will be in decreasing communication lag-time and interoperability between /people/ asymptotically to nil.
We will still be individuals, but we will be tied inexorably to not only each other, but the vast amount of data stored on the internet.
What makes us /think/ better, however, is speed and utility of communication. What helps us /remember/ better is the speed and utility of information retrieval.
The latter has been increasing faster than the former. We need fundamentally gigantic changes in human-computer-human communication to affect the former. The first of these was the internet, of course. What we've been doing with it since its inception are comparative baby-steps - someday, perhaps soon, there will be a leap just as big as the Internet is.
And it will be fundamentally destabilizing to everything we know as society today.