Okay I have a few assumptions about the future of humanity & technology:
- We will NEVER just stop researching. Technology will advance as long as humans exist
- Intelligence is something that can be fully explained by science
IF YOU DISAGREE WITH THIS, THIS THREAD IS NOT FOR YOU
- Advances in technology speed up exponentially
From these 3 assumptions it is clear that we will create artificial intelligence similar to our own. This intelligence would be able to create even more advanced intelligence and so forth..
So it is inevitable that "artificial" intelligence will become more powerful than human intelligence, which in return means that machines WILL take over the world at some point.
The question is: when will it happen ? What do you think ?
I'd say 50-150 years. This may sound ridiculously soon, but think about what humans achieved in the last 50 years. A global Communication system, which stores nearly ALL information generated in the world, accessible by everyone at anytime, mobile phones that work nearly everywhere, airplanes that can't be controlled by humans anymore, just by computers, etc...
remember, computing power has grown exponentially for quite some time now, see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law