The theory of technological singularity predicts a point in time when humans lose control over their technological inventions and subsequent developments due to the rise of machine consciousness and, as a result, their superior intelligence. Reaching singularity stage, in short, constitutes artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) greatest threat to humanity. Unfortunately, AI singularity is already underway.
AI will be effective not only when machines can do what humans do (replication), but when they can do it better and without human supervision (adaptation). Reinforcement learning (recognized data leading to predicted outcomes) and supervised learning algorithms (labeled data leading to predicted outcomes) have been important to the development of robotics, digital assistants and search engines. But the future of many industries and scientific exploration hinges more on the development of unsupervised learning algorithms (unlabeled data leading to improved outcomes), including autonomous vehicles, non-invasive medical diagnosis, assisted space construction, autonomous weapons design, facial-biometric recognition, remote industrial production and stock market prediction.