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NPR Looks to Technological Singularity
Rick Kleffel writes to tell us that NPR is featuring a piece with both Vernor Vinge and Cory Doctorow looking at the possibility of the "technological singularity" in the near future. Wikipedia defines a technological singularity as a "hypothetical "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development. Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, posthumans and/or strong AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete."
from BoingBoing http://boingboing.net/ http://craphound.com.nyud.net:8080/man-machine-mer ger.mp3
AT&T Videophones were first built in 1956, aka the PicturePhone(TM).
p icture.html
http://www.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I think Bruce Sterling gave a talk on this subject, it can be found a bit down on this page: Long Now Seminars.
My personal whimsical theo.. hypoth... idea is that alien civilizations turn into (towards us) apathetic singularities, and that's why we will never hear Chenjesu's crystaline humming calling us. Maybe the universe will end in some sort of rather dull uniform black technological singularity goo.
The Chair Corp. comic(*00-12)
The past "singularities" you cite (e.g. agricultural revolution) were actually punctuated S-curve periods of progress that happened at a rate slow enough for the human mind to adapt to.
*THE* Singularity -- that Vinge, Kurzweil, Moravec, Yudkowski, and many others smart enough to extrapolate the evidence can't "shut up" about -- is where the exponential curve is near vertical. It's where the primitive bio-human brain can no longer keep up with the accelerating change; hence the need to transcend or die at that point (2030 - 2050).
It's nothing to be afraid of. Either most of us living today will get to see The Singularity, or our primitive-brain VS. accelerating-tech will finally fuck it all up and none of us will see it. Maybe the brewing "WW3" in the middle east is how we'll join the club of "missing" alien races of Fermi's Paradox?
Power to the Peaceful
If it takes over the world, neo will just have to find a hole in the Internet Explorer 2199
http://research.microsoft.com/os/singularity/
Douglas Hofstadter, a Pulitzer prize winning author with a Ph.D. in physics and an appointment in Cognitive Science at Indiana University, talked about Ray Kurzweil's predictions of the oncoming technological singularity at the Artificial Life X conference this year. An audio-only webcast of his talk is available.
>But: name one technological advance that humans in the past have been capable of and refrained from. There are none.
:-)
Nuclear-powered aircraft.
Flying cars.
Project Orion.
Mach 3 aircraft with real payload, e.g. the XB-70.
Fiber to the home.
Betamax
In terms of the technological singularity, there's a big difference between brute-force search over a finite-but-large space and the sort of reasoning that humans do. Simply put, we haven't figured out how to get computers to do the sort of creative reasoning that is probably necessary for a computer to improve its own design in a way substantial enough to cause the technological singularity.
On the chess problem alone and Hofstadter's prediction, what really happened was a duel between Hofstadter and Moore, in a sense. Eventually, the raw computing power available for looking ahead through chess's ginormous FSM became large enough that having access to the lookahead information proved more useful than the abstract reasoning skills of the chess grandmasters. That was really a theoretical inevitability once the algorithm for performing that lookahead was devised (decades ago, though the more recent programs now use heuristics to prune away large parts of the search tree's breadth). In fact, at that point, the only thing not inevitable was actually fairly unrelated to actually playing chess: the continuing improvement in generic computing hardware, semiconductors, etc.
But even if computing hardware continues to improve, there's no guarantee that we'll ever come up with the algorithm necessary for allowing computers to cause the technological singularity. That's the difference between this and chess, because with chess, the algorithm was known, and it was just a matter of giving computers enough time to chug away. The technological singularity may be impossible, for all we know right now. However, even Hofstadter agrees that it's probably an eventuality, though he's orders of magnitude less optimistic about it happening "soon" than Kurzweil is.
AI is hardly impossible given our currently available technology.
However, it is currently impractical by currently available means
for one even to go about simulating a brain, much less at the
same speed a human thinks. 20 billion neurons of more than a
dozen different types take up a lot of ram, not to mention disk
space.
Outside of the technological hurdles that will eventually go away,
Knowledge of human brain is reaching a critical mass which will
eventually result in a basic artificial intelligence. Don't expect the
first one to have godlike intelligence or whatnot. Don't even expect
it to be totally sane from our point of view. And for God's sake,
don't expect the Asimov Rules, as they are nearly impossible to
implement when dealing with something as complex as a neural
network.
Non sequitur: Your facts are uncoordinated.
A little historical correction is in order here.
Vaccination came about because of Edward Jenner's observation that milkmaids tended not to get smallpox. The milkmaids had been exposed to cowpox (vaccinia) and were immune. Jenner developed a smallpox vaccine in 1796. Pasteur later went on to further develop the technique, but credit for the discovery should go to Jenner.
You could already be ruled by the machines. They could be too smart for you to let on. Skewing Internet search results here, subtly controlling the price of commodities. You can't say for sure.