“From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in ‘a million years’ (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.” – Vernor Vinge
This is ‘the second in a series of posts about the major myths of robotics’ in Erik Sofge’s Zero Moment blog on the Popular Science website.
My view is that there is a much stronger candidate for a robotic ‘singularity’ than AI, and that is the development of self-replicating robotic factories: robots building factories to build more robots. This development will make robots ubiquitous to an extent we can barely imagine today, constrained only by unavoidable resource limitations. Whoever (whichever companies and/or investors) gets in on the ground floor of this development will become the tycoons of the coming age.
See on www.popsci.com