The Era Of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI)

Computers have been around for more than 60 years, and during that time they almost caught up with two hundred thousand years of human brain evolution. 

Now there is a hypothesis that suggest that at some point computers will be so fast till they reach a level of smartness that is similar to the human intelligence (because our computers are getting faster and smarter at an exponential rate), and scientists has started while ago a number of projects/researches to build a conscious machines, and these 10 year (2010-2020) are the most important 10 years in the history of Artificial Intelligence, Artificial Brains, Artificial Consciousness, and Conscious Machines.

Ray Kurzweil wrote a book "The Singularity Is Near" he talked about how that current computers (phones for example) are billion times 'more powerful per dollar' and its 'hundred thousand times' smaller than the computer he used 30 years ago. 

he added that the Artificial Intelligence Scientists/Researchers will do that again in the next 30 years, to make it reach the size of the blood cells and again it will be billion times 'more powerful per dollar' than the ones that we have today.

Now the design of the human brain is not simple, but yet its not infinitely complex either, and its a level of complexity that is manageable, and we are making already as Humans/Scientists/Researchers a exponential growth in understanding it.

and since this decade is witnessing a humongous researches on artificial intelligence, artificial brains, artificial consciousness and conscious machines.

its very normal to observe that some projects are making a huge progress on this topic. 

for example three projects has started to crack the human brain in terms of computer science, genetics, nanotechnology, neurology: 

1- Human Brain Project
its European project, with the extraordinary budget of €1bn (£860m), there objective is to develop six ICT platforms, dedicated respectively to Neuroinformatics, Brain Simulation, High Performance Computing, Medical Informatics, Neuromorphic Computing and Neurorobotics. 

2- The BRAIN Initiative 
its a US Collaborative, public-private research initiative announced by the Obama administration on April 2, 2013, with the goal of supporting the development and application of innovative technologies that can create a dynamic understanding of brain function.
it has a more moderate, but still mind-boggling, budget of $100m (£64m).

3- Blue Brain Project (The One That You Should Focus on)
began in 2005 with an agreement between the EPFL and IBM, which supplied the BlueGene/L supercomputer acquired by EPFL to build the virtual brain.

They are reconstructing the brain piece by piece and building a virtual brain in a supercomputer "these are some of the goals of the Blue Brain Project". 
The virtual brain will be an exceptional tool giving neuroscientists a new understanding of the brain and a better understanding of neurological diseases.

The computing power needed is considerable, each simulated neuron requires the equivalent of a laptop computer. A model of the whole brain would have billions. Supercomputing technology is rapidly approaching a level where simulating the whole brain becomes a concrete possibility.

As a first step, the project succeeded in simulating a rat cortical column. This neuronal network, the size of a pinhead, recurs repeatedly in the cortex. A rat's brain has about 100,000 columns of in the order of 10,000 neurons each. In humans, the numbers are dizzying—a human cortex may have as many as two million columns, each having in the order of 100,000 neurons each.

Blue Brain is a resounding success. In five years of work, Henry Markram's team has perfected a facility that can create realistic models of one of the brain's essential building blocks, This process is entirely data driven and essentially automatically executed on the supercomputer.

Meanwhile the generated models show a behavior already observed in years of neuroscientific experiments. These models will be basic building blocks for larger scale models leading towards a complete virtual brain.

More About the Topic

Prof. Hugo De Garis once said that the physics of computation for the future technologies can totally outperform, outclass what the human brain can do. 

*Read more about the Theory of Computation

a famous examples proofs that this growth is happening :
1- 1997 when Deep Blue (IBM Computer) beaten Garry kasparov in chess! 
2- in 2011 when a machines called Watson beaten two humans in the Legendary game Jeopardy! 

Now in a number of thesis, they suggest that in 50 years (+-) from now the dominant species will be the machines, but a lot of people will reject even the idea that humans will be number 2! 

so the moderate-suggested vision of the future is that we are all gonna be enhanced by the technologies as we will be part of it, and maybe just maybe we can unlock at that time the secretes of immortality,(remember the blood cells sized computers in the beginning)

and in the future we will be more smarter by putting these blood cells sized computers in our bodies , and we will use it to keep us healthy from inside, and they will go inside our brains and interact with our biological neurons.

and may be put our brains on the internet or using could computing and backing up the brain information (there is a number of researches on this topic as well) 


Are We Witnessing A Technological Singularity ?

The idea of The Singularity has been around for over 50 years. It had a small surge of media attention and in the 1990s and quickly died away. This decade however, it's back in the public eye and far less fringe than ever before. There is a Singularity University, a Singularity Hub, a feature documentary about it and it made the cover of Time Magazine in February 2011. 

The Singularity as defined by Singularitarians is this: our computers are getting faster and smarter at an exponential rate, meaning they are getting faster at getting faster, Eventually machines will be able to match human-level intelligence, when they do, they will take over their own development; they will be conscious, at this point, the world might changes and it is impossible to predict exactly what will happen after that point. Just like an event horizon in a black hole, so technological Singularitarians borrow the term from physics and call it a Singularity. 

and at the end i think yes, we are witnessing a 'Technological Singularity' because we are seeing the results of those researches, and its very interesting and promising. 

 
*Read More about Technological Sٍٍingularity

At The End, Did We Think It Enough? 

what if we managed to actually create a conscious machine? what will happen! 

all i can say is that let's hope we (as humans) don't screw this up, because we are building a very powerful machines, a machines that possesses "human level" intelligence, and unless we specifically emulate a human brain (with all its limitations), we will be achieving a very risky goal.

Meaning that any future artificial intelligence will exceed human performance on every task for which it is considered a source of "intelligence" in the first place, and an AI might very well develop goals incompatible with our own. 
(Take a moment and think about it, its scary)

because we seem to be in the process of building a sort of God, now would be a good time to wonder whether it will (or even can) be a good one ? 

*Read More Can We Avoid a Digital Apocalypse?