Will the technological singularity be possible with semiconductor computers

Question

Sooner or later Moore's Law will run its course and semiconductor technology will reach its peak performance. There are hopes for quantum computers, but will the technological singularity be possible before their advent?

And as a side note, might the hardware for smarter than human computers be created but the singularity delayed because of inferior software or is software expected to be right at the heels of hardware?

Answer 1

It seems likely.

The brain has quite a bit of resources tied up in visual recognition.  Computers are generally bad at this at the moment. I don't believe computers need to match the brain in compute power to achieve the singularity. Where the brain has lots of parallel computing slowly, silicon does one or a small number of things quickly.  Supercomputers are already getting thousands of processors.  This is how it's going to happen.

However, there is that "little matter of software".

One of the things that's already happening is that computers are allowing advances that would not be possible without them.  In this sense, the singularity has already started.

Answer 2

Yes. The end of all things is at hand.

Answer 3

My guess is yes, semiconductors will be sufficient to reach singularity, and that's really all that's necessary. After that computers will figure out the next step. Quantum computers seem to have lost some of the promise that many have had for them. So if semiconductors aren't capable of acheiving singularity it may be awhile before someone figures out the next step in computing.

As difficult as perfecting the hardware may be, it's the software that's the really crucial bit. I know that there are people working on it, but I doubt that they will ever really be ready. Fortunately I don't think that we will really know exactly when we reach singularity. I don't think that we will turn on a computer one day, fire up the software and suddenly have a super intelligent computer. I think that we will only know it in hindsight. So we should have time to perfect both the hardware and the software. I also doubt that there will only be one version of software. I can just imagine Microsoft vs Google or Apple. Personally I doubt that it will happen within the next 25 years, but hopefully I'll live long enough to see it.