Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up! Response to The Singularity

Responding to Chalmers' The Singularity (2010), I argue that progress towards self-improving AIs is already substantially beyond what many futurists and philosophers are aware of. Instead of rehashing well-trodden topics of the previous millennium, let us start focusing on relevant new millennium results. All indented paragraphs of this paper are quotes taken from Chalmers' paper of 2010, who mentions Good's informal speculations (1965) on ultraintelligent self-improving machines: The key idea is that a machine that is more intelligent than humans will be better than humans at designing machines. So it will be capable of designing a machine more intelligent than the most intelligent machine that humans can design. Chalmers speculates that some sort of meta-evolution could be used to build more and more intelligent machines called AI, AI+, AI++...: The process of evolution might count as an indirect example: less intel- ligent systems have the capacity to create more intelligent systems by reproduction, variation and natural selection. This version would then come to the same thing as an evolutionary path to AI and AI++. (...) If we produce an AI by machine learning, it is likely that soon after we will be able to improve the learning algorithm and extend the learning pro- cess, leading to AI+. If we produce an AI by artificial evolution, it is