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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."
You know, I used to have this technological post-human bent. Buried in C++ programming projects, I admired the order of all that I was creating. It was fun. I'd get a new set of behaviors programmed in the usual conditional branching - if/else, class polymorphism, you name it - and seeing it work was exhilarating. The idea that humanity could reinvent its world piece by piece - much like in the argument where if you replaced each neuron in your brain one by one with an artificial equivalent, at what point would you cease to be human, if at all? I still have Raymond Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines on one of my bookshelves.
;)
The thing is, we are still way surpassed at this by billions of years of evolution. We run on energy from fossil fuels and build from materials we've mined and shipped. On the other hand, we find bacteria living in the most surprising places, we find superior sonar in dolphins and bats to anything we make, and all of it runs on, ultimately, fresh plant matter. We get excited over a myomer that lifted some heavy weight, and I tell you, an elephant can do the same thing given enough food. The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature. We're worrying about when oil will peak, if we can live another century, and outside our doors the world can go on for eons to come provided we don't break it with our silly toys.
And in a geek-intense environment like this one, I think I can say that it's difficult to beat the end product of a long-term evolutionary algorithm, which itself is an arguably good model of what the world around us acts like, and you all will understand.
I don't deny the coolness of my Apple notebook and I've got a decent number of shelves full of programming books, but I think biomimicry is where it's at. We can go a lot further learning from our world of proteins and DNA and RNA and using - or just having fun with! - what's already there.
We can also get out more and enjoy our analog, fuzzy-logic, neural-net-driven, molecularly-computed fleshy selves.
Artificial primarily means that it comes from artifice (ingenuity) or art. It doesn't (directly) mean it's fake, it just means it's a consciously created work of humankind rather than nature. I think that in modern times with so many knock-offs of natural goods, such as artificial sweetener, the secondary definition has gained the upper hand.
Check out wictionary (It's the hive-mind wikipedia, it must be right!)
When you read enough literature from the 16th and 17th centuries you get more familiar with the original, literal meanings of words such as this one. A favorite subject was to compare art to nature, and they'd freely use the word "artificial" to mean that which comes from human arts. This is not to say that the secondary definition is wrong: for example, when in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene a troll creates an artificial woman to replace the girl who left him out of snow, "virgin" wax and some gold wire (and of course wackiness ensues) it is repeatedly underscored that this "False Florimell" is a cheap immitation.
Anyway, you can chose any definition you like. I sort of prefer artificial intelligence to synthetic intelligence or whatever, just because how you regard the word artificial says a lot about you and what you think of human creativity. And I don't like euphamism treadmills, which is effectively what we're talking about here.
Will AIs produce AIs, and if so, will they be better, or equally flawed?
The current thinking is that we will make seed AI, i.e., general intelligence for manipulating software, and that it will improve itself, in an incremental fashion, all the way up to and beyond the level of human intelligence. Of course, this will be done with the help and guidance of programmers but the fear is that by giving it free reign to manipulate itself we will no longer be able to understand what it creates. Not only will this mean that we won't learn anything, but we'll also be unable to control it. As such, most people who seriously consider working on this stuff advocate a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal. That way, even if the beast gets out of control, the worst it will do is solve world hunger.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Humans are proud of their abilities. They fashion themselves to be the most capable species on earth. If, in the future we are outclassed by artificial intelligence, it seems likely that the we will feel ashamed of ourselves, in a sense. When first-class athletes go past their prime, they are likely to retire out of the game. They do not want to compete as a second-class athlete. Advanced AI could really hurt our feelings, and spawn a desire to give up. I mean, what's the point of life if we aren't on top?
My reply to this was simply: Die fighting for those that you love.
Of course, in such a scenario we might be faced with the choice of enhancing ourselves through biology and cybernetics, so as to compete with our "AI over-lords." But such a choice may really alter what it means and feels to be human. I am not saying whether this is good or bad, but I am saying that if we do decide to take that course we will be sacrificing the human experience for the sake of preservation of the species.
So, I wasn't truly talking about natural selction, and I should have left it out of my previous post. Evolution, however, is WHAT I am talking about. Evolution simply means: A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. (from dictionary.com) Of course, biology uses that term within the framework of genetic change over time.
A Good Troll is better than a Bad Human.
> From what I've seen we are as near to creating decent AI as we are to producing fusion power stations.
About 10 years away then...
One of the toughest nuts to crack is what are we going to want to do, that is, what should our goals be.
If you look at most of the goals we have right now, they're pretty mundane and shortlived. Curing disease, stop killing each other, end to hunger, creating objects that we find beautiful and pleasing, creating more living beings like ourselves.
Once we reach a singularity we'll have the technology to do away with all these problem oriented goals and I for the life of me can't really think of any obvious goals past that point. While I agree with the premise that we don't have any reliable way of predicting what our goals will become past the singularity, does anyone have any guesses?
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that all is suffering. Nietzsche (whose philosophy has Buddhist influences) wrote of the will to power of all things. If we think of suffering as being caused by a lack of power, then the amount of suffering one feels is equal to the amount of power one has left to be gained.
After this "singularity" occurs and we have used technology to transcend our organic existence and overcome the plights of present day humans, the only suffering left will be the power not yet possessed. This power will be attainable in the form of technology, or rather, information. New found knowledge will continue to empower whatever humanity evolves into, be it super powerful AI, or perhaps some type of collective intelligence.
So, my guess as to what a possible goal for future civilizations might be, which is the same basic goal as we have now is... to maintain and gain power, and it will happen via the acquisition of new information, i.e. learning.
1 voice in a sea of voices
Um, enhancing ourselves through biology and cybernetics would be well within what defines us as human. Using the biological definition, we're still human as long as our descendents can breed with each other. Using the "man vs. beast" definition, the use of technology to make us greater than our natural abilities permits is what defines us as human in the first place. Even the modern concept of 'soul' would not particularly be violated by prosthetic addition, because we've drifted away from the midaeval soul as the sum total of a beings identity and moved to the hippieish 'ghost in the machine' definition of soul.
I'll also note that your whole argument stems from the assumption that the human race will be in some sort of competition with its tools. Frankly, there's no reason to think anything will compete with us as a race unless we design it that way. As individuals, sure, you'll lose your job if a robotic assembly line can do it better, but you only got the job in the first place because of the existing technology that let you steal the job from the rug weaver in africa (or whatever). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
...it's really a sad day for America when we require a goddamn ACT OF CONGRESS to make our DVD players work properly. ~
The problem is also mostly with the expectations people have of computers. Everyone wants computers to return deterministic and easily tracable results. For example if I want a value from a database I want to issue a query and have the value returned. I don't want a system that would return it faster but only with 80% of correctness, I don't want any "fuzziness" only exact numbers. In other words people would rather have computers do what computers are doing - calculating stuff fast and exactly, they don't want computers to really act like humans. I think subconsciously we will just never allow computers to reach a human level of soffistication and thus they will probably never surpass us.
On the other hand, what would rather happen is that we will slowly integrate machines into ourselves - litteraly. As soon as the baby is born we will tag it with an RFID, we will implant sensors for infrared vision, ultrasound, we will inject nanoparticles to boost the immune system. In other words I see a cyborg future were we become one with the machines. If anything or anyone will destroy us it will only by ourselves, at the same time if anything helps us prosper, it will also be ourselves. The future is (mostly - short of a big meteorite hitting us) in our hands...
Did anyone foresee that in the 90s the largest empire humans ever built would evaporate like a soap bubble? (Except Poul Anderson in the 1953 story "The Last Deliverer"). Talk about existing models of how things work falling apart.
Imagine an intelligent and curious human from rural Nepal, or Papua New Guinea. Could you explain your job to them?
Could you do your job without the embryonic augmentations we have now, such as Google?
We're partway up that vertical curve now.
I don't get it. I live in Australia, and I see 3G video phones on tv all the time. I don't own one because I'm a geek and I don't see why you need a phone to do more than allow you to talk to people, but every second 16-22 year old has one. Maybe the problem with predicting the future is simply that Americans are all living in the past.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Ethically speaking, you have the right to resist indeed. What's missing from the discussion (and for TFA if I'd only read it) is one of the most important factors that make singularity a thing to welcome, if you have the guts to modify yourself, or to refuse no matter what: the forces driving our development.
It might be we still follow the survival of the fittest rule.
But then, how come I sense this disturbing trend that is stripping the single man of all his cultural and material property?
Men in the past had access to renewable water sources because there was a different kind of pollution, didn't fear the sun because of the ozone layer depletion, didn't pollute the land with genetically engineered crop or chemicals. Culturally speaking the trend is stripping man of every set of values which is not money: French revolution fucked the aristocracy. Fascist trolls made us hate nationalism associating it with violence and ignorance (this is an european perspective, in fact usa people were more nationalist, but now you have your own bush troll). Global media fucked home-bred traditions in the west, while Communism did the same in a more violent and explicit way in the east. Corporations have stripped us of science. Scientific experiments in total privacy and patents make not science, but occultism. Now everything is poised to strip us of religion, as the battle is between islamic violent and sexist integralism, neo-con crusaders, zionists will end up with people worn by WWIII refusing anything that remotely sounds like faith.
This is a brain dump not an analysis. Am I wrong? I sure hope i am. But think about it when you have to evaluate any change marketed as "progress".
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