UPDATE: Thanks to the anonymous commenter who pointed out that Justin Rattner is the CTO, not the CEO of Intel. Granted, a CTO saying these things is not as big a deal as a CEO, but I maintain that having the CTO of Intel say these things is still a fairly big deal.

A couple of months ago, we did a show exploring whether the technological singularity and associated accelerating change ideas are becoming mainstream, and what steps might be taken to move such ideas further along in that direction. I have not been shy about stating (and reiterating) that if humanity's near -- or even long-term -- future involves the emergence of a superintelligence that forever alters what live on this planet is all about, people ought to know about it.

It really ought to be as familiar a concept as, say, climate change.

So it occurs to me that, when the CEO CTO of a Fortune 100 company acknowledges that he not only buys into the idea of the singularity, but apparently takes it for granted, we are very much heading in the direction of this becoming a mainstream idea.

Steve Leibson tells the story thusly:

Greene's first question concerned when we'd know that the singularity had arrived. [Intel CEO CTO Justin] Rattner replied that we'd know it was here when we saw a robot emptying our dishwasher. In other words, when we've handed routine tasks over to machines, then we should know.

Now before you chuckle, be aware that unloading a dishwasher is not as mundane as you might think. For one thing, my wife has yet to train me to do it reliably and I'm pretty sure I have human-level intelligence. Just don't ask her. However, there are lots of issues with getting a machine to do this kitchen work. First, there's substantial dexterity involved in maneuvering dishes in and out of the dishwasher's racks and up to the storage shelves without breaking some dishes. Especially stemware. I hate stemware.

I agree with Leibson on the stemware thing, but I can't quite get behind Rattner's answer. A robot that can empty the dishwasher will be a remarkably sophisticated machine -- and I like an answer that diverges so widely from stock, Turing-test type definitions -- but that task requires human-level intelligence at best. A world in which robots empty dishwashers -- and that's the height of robot sophistication -- is a pre-singularity world. At some point, robots will be doing all our driving for us, but even that development won't mean that the singularity is upon us.

So kudos to Rattner for taking the idea of the singularity seriously, even if he doesn't articulate a terribly helpful definition of what it is. I think this is an idea that needs to be taken seriously even by those who consider it unlikely. (Alvis Brigis does a good job of showing how this is done.) Some possibilities are so high-impact that we need to consider them even if their probability of happening is quite low. For example, it's not at all likely that a huge meteor will hit the earth in the next 50 years. But does anyone think that the possibility should therefore be ignored?

Steve Leibson obviously doesn't take the idea of the singularity seriously, and that's too bad, seeing as he has provided the only report I can find (so far) on Rattner's comments. Rattner may have followed up the idea of the dishwashing robot with some thoughts on how that leads to superhuman intelligence. Leibson does give us this tidbit to chew on:

Rattner alluded to the bird-bone flute discovery -- just announced today -- that was found in the Ach Valley of southern Germany. That means that scientists now have a record of human artifact development that goes back at least 35,000 years or about 30,000 years before the flood. Rattner says that we will see more technological development in the next 100 years than in the previous 35,000 that is, if we (or the robots) don't kill off the human race in the next 100 years.

Wow, 35000 years of progress in the next 100 years? That's quite an endorsement of the idea of accelerating change to come from the mouth of a corporate CEO CTO, even if his company DOES make computer chips! By way of comparison, I think Ray Kurzweil says that we will experience 20,000 years of progress during the twentieth 21st century [thanks, Sally]. So either Rattner is more bullish even than Kurzweil on human progress, or we're going to see a lot of progress between 2101 and 2109. And the latter is possible, after all, if acceleration continues. After 2109 it just keeps getting faster and faster, to the point where we won't ever even see the year 2200.

As these ideas become more mainstream, we're likely to see more of these superlative scenarios from increasingly unexpected sources. As a confirmed superlativist myself, I'm all for that. But I hope we get more on the other side of the discussion than people rolling their eyes and making dismissive wisecracks. Thoughtful criticism is vital. I hope the mainstreaming of the Singularity means we'll see more arguments of the Bill Joy and Dale Carrico caliber -- also coming from unexpected sources.