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I'm not sure why awareness is critical to a singularity.Requiring machine intelligence to have a similar consciousness to humans is like asking submarines to swim like a fish, and anyways computer already have self awareness(reflection in programming languages, and some robots who use reflection to learn how to optimize movement) - it's useful but doesn't seem critical AFAIK.

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Good point.

The development of some kind of strong AI is often proposed as a catalyst for a technological singularity, and I was kind of following that lead. While I agree that self-awareness may not be needed, it is the only thing I can think of that would motivate an AI to enhance itself up the exponential curve. Relying oh humans to do this probably wouldn't work (past some initial pump-priming) as they tend to get distracted by other human-scale things.

On the other hand, speculating about motivation in relation to an AI may be misleading anyway...

The general motivation behind the improvement of technologies is money and power given to those who control them. This could work for AI.

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