Tom FahyCygnus Express (January 2, 1997)

‘Tom Fahy' was an assemblage of musicians headed by multi-instrumentalist, composer, arranger and County Galway native Tom Fahy, born Quinn McCarthy (1971-19 June 2008). Core members included Jiang Dan, Rachael Eisley, Zhang Li and Liu Kaige, while other players were drafted for the requirements of particular pieces. Their 50+ album catalogue was the fruit of a 9-year collaboration initiated while the core members were in residence in Honolulu, Hawai'i. To each album, the members brought a myriad of musical competencies.


This audio is part of the collection: Open Source Audio

Artist/Composer: Tom Fahy
Date: 1997-01-02
Keywords: Ambient; Space Ambient; Instrumental; Experimental

Creative Commons license: Attribution-Share Alike 3.0

Notes

Official Website

The Technological Singularity

The technological singularity is a theoretical future point of unprecedented technological progress, caused in part by the ability of machines to improve themselves using artificial intelligence.

Statistician I. J. Good first wrote of an "intelligence explosion," suggesting that if machines could even slightly surpass human intellect, they could improve their own designs in ways unforeseen by their designers, and thus recursively augment themselves into far greater intelligences. The first such improvements might be small, but as the machine became more intelligent it would become better at becoming more intelligent, which could lead to an exponential and quite sudden growth in intelligence.

Vernor Vinge later called this event "the Singularity" as an analogy between the breakdown of modern physics near a gravitational singularity and the drastic change in society he argues would occur following an intelligence explosion. In the 1980s, Vinge popularized the singularity in lectures, essays, and science fiction. More recently, some prominent technologists such as Bill Joy, founder of Sun Microsystems, voiced concern over the potential dangers of Vinge's singularity. Following its introduction in Vinge's stories, particularly Marooned in Realtime and A Fire Upon the Deep, the singularity has also become a common plot element in science fiction.

Others, most prominently Ray Kurzweil, define the singularity as a period of extremely rapid technological progress. Kurzweil argues such an event is implied by a long-term pattern of accelerating change that generalizes Moore's Law to technologies predating the integrated circuit and which he argues will continue to other technologies not yet invented. Critics of Kurzweil's interpretation consider it an example of static analysis, citing particular failures of the predictions of Moore's Law.

Robin Hanson proposes that multiple "singularities" have occurred throughout history, dramatically affecting the growth rate of the economy. Like the agricultural and industrial revolutions of the past, the technological singularity would increase economic growth between 60 and 250 times. An innovation that allowed for replacement of virtually all human labor could trigger this singularity.

Source: Wikipedia

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