Is there a 'Singularity', an ascension of man being able to become machines or machines becoming sentient, coming in 2045?
Given the current state of artificial intelligence and robotics, that would only happen if we were able to put a man on the Moon in a relative time scale of 3 minutes. In reality, selling books and tickets to conferences showing "Man + (Black Box Full Of Magic) = SINGULARITY" not much progress has been made in decades much less anything leading us to believe the drastic inflection point needed will be happening any time this century.
The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers.The task requires hardly any thought. But as Dr. Brooks points out, training a robot to do it is a vastly harder problem for artificial intelligence researchers than I.B.M.’s celebrated victory on “Jeopardy!” this year with a robot named Watson. - In Search of a Robot More Like Us By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times
If you can't even fold towels, no miraculous ascension is happening by 2045. To make this towel-folding robot even remotely interesting, they had to speed the video up 50X. 25 minutes to fold a towel is not all that great if you want your brain to be stored digitally by 2045.
But they are making progress to at least doing more than folding a towel. “Our end goal right now is to do an entire laundry cycle,” said Pieter Abbeel, a Berkeley computer scientist who leads the group behind the towel-folder, “from dirty laundry in a basket to everything stacked away after it’s been washed and dried.”
That's not to make fun of their research, it is interesting stuff. It is to make fun of people who are selling books to gullible people with the promise they will live forever if they can live to 2045.
