The Slowdown Hypothesis

The so-called singularity hypothesis embraces the most ambitious goal of Artificial Intelligence: the possibility of constructing human-like intelligent systems. The intriguing addition is that once this goal is achieved, it would not be too difficult to surpass human intelligence. While we believe that none of the philosophical objections against strong AI are really compelling, we are skeptical about a singularity scenario associated with the achievement of human-like systems. Several reflections on the recent history of neuroscience and AI, in fact, seem to suggest that the trend is going in the opposite direction.