As the authors point out, such civilizations might prefer locations with little electronic noise in a dry and cold environment, perhaps in space, where they could use superconductivity for computing and quantum entanglement as a means of communication. So they wouldn’t necessarily be located on a planet in the so-called habitable zone. If other civilizations are similar to ours but older, we would expect that they already moved beyond the singularity. But it might have a drastic impact on the search for extraterrestrial intelligent life (SETI). What will this mean for astrobiology? Not much, if we’re searching only for microbial extraterrestrial life. According to Kurzweil, humans may then be fully replaced by AI, or by some hybrid of humans and machines. When this occurs, the end of the human race might very well be upon us, they say, citing a 2014 prediction by the late Stephen Hawking. The authors don’t know when the singularity will come, but come it will.

For example, whales and elephants have more than double the number of neurons in their brain, but are not more intelligent than humans. Also, the size of the brain or the number of neurons don’t equate to intelligence. However, a human brain is “wired” differently than a computer, and that may be the reason why certain tasks that are simple for us are still quite challenging for today’s AI. If we look at the calculating capacity of computers and compare it to the number of neurons in the human brain, the singularity could be reached as soon as the early 2020s. The strategy game StarCraft II may be the next to have a machine as reigning champion. It’s already been four years since the program AlphaGO, fortified with neural networks and learning modes, defeated Lee Sedol, the Go world champion.

While futurist Ray Kurzweil predicted 15 years ago that the singularity-the time when the abilities of a computer overtake the abilities of the human brain-will occur in about 2045, Gale and his co-authors believe this event may be much more imminent, especially with the advent of quantum computing.

Kurzweil updates