Singularity Now! The Artificial Intelligence Timeline: Automation, robotics, tech titans, and their brave new world (February 2018)

Singularity Now! is a nonfiction news mash-up covering advances in artificial intelligence and other high technologies building to the singularity. This edition summarizes more than 275 articles [350+ citations]. Generally speaking, this month’s headlines reveal we continue to hurdle towards general intelligence AI, with mixed opinions, high anticipation and grave warnings of what will happen afterwards. This accomplishment, the final harbinger of the technological singularity, will be preceded by two milestones. First, the total control grid will be established. This will be complete when a sizeable stratum of the upper-middle and upper class -- meaning the MBA class, its immediate subordinates and its fellow travelers -- has almost every waking experience automatically dictated to them by high technology. The illusion of choice (such as, for example, between Coke and Pepsi or Democrat or Republican), however, will likely remain. The automated control grid will be fully mature when society is cashless. This milestone is almost within reach. Second, a sect of proto-transhumanists, first generation quasi-cyborgs and their supporters, from the breakaway civilization that is the beneficiary of the total control grid, will assume positions of covert influence, power and control. They will have the resources and manpower to make those final crucial discoveries that will foment the required climatic crescendo of innovation.