Shake it, we won't make it, UN Secretary-General issues Red Alert for the world in 2018...

Nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise, inequality is growing, climate change is accelerating and the world is seeing horrific violations of human rights, he said. Global anxieties about nuclear weapons were the highest since the Cold War.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Okay, this one affected me personally.

Google's Deepmind team adapted their AlphaZero approach for the games of  chess and shogi and dropped the bomb already on the 5th of December.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815

For chess they trained the Deep Neural Network for 4 to 9 hours on an  cluster with 5000+64 TPUs (1st+2nd gen) and reached super human level.

Unlike in Go, they did not compete with humans, cos chess engines are already on an super grandmaster like level, no, they did compete with the worlds strongest open source engine - Stockfish, result:

100 game match with 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses for AlphaZero.

This is definitely a smack in the face for all computer chess programmers out there. Next stop Neanderthal Man.

So, with thanks to the Krampus,
+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

...the Singularity to take off.

China wants to pass US in AI by 2030...

eric-schmidt-and-bob-work-our-ai-sputnik-moment-is-now

china-challenges-nvidias-hold-on-artificial-intelligence-chips

And Banksters are investing again in good old silicon...

the-race-to-power-ais-silicon-brains

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Ohoh, another warning from our beloved scientists concerning our impaired ecosphere.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Flippy from Miso Robotics is able to roast hamburgers, twice as many burgers per hour as an human does, and this is just the beginning of the kitchen conquer they say...

+1 points for the Singularity to take off ;-)

"Without rapid cuts in CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, we will be heading for dangerous temperature increases by the end of this century," Petteri Taalas, the WMO's secretary-general, said in a statement.

If we are too busy with an collapsing biospehre, we may have not enough resources for the Singularity.

-1 points for the Singularity to take off.

"Replacing bank and insurance workers with machines risks creating a dependency on outside technology companies beyond the reach of regulators, the global Financial Stability Board (FSB) said on Wednesday".

Considering HFT, they probably know what they are talking about.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

AlphaGo Zero teaches itself Go on Grandmaster level in three days, "Go from an alternate dimension" .

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

It still can not compete with handcrafted designs, but it is one step closer to the direct feedback loop a technological Singularity needs - when machines create machines.

+1 points for the Singularity to take off.

Silicon Valley Techies begin to disconnect from the Internet, attracts too much attention and can be manipulative they say.

Is it just rogue memes fighting for human brain resources, or could it be an sign that we reached some kind of informational tipping point?

In both cases, i give +1 points for the Singularity to take off.