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IEEE Special Report On the Singularity
jbcarr83 writes "The IEEE Spectrum is running a special issue on the technological singularity as envisioned by Vernor Vinge and others. Articles on both sides of the will it/won't it divide appear, though most take the it will approach. I found Richard A.L. Jones' contribution, 'Rupturing The Nanotech Rapture,' to be of particular interest. He puts forward some very sound objections to nanomachines of the Drexler variety."
We're all living virtualized lives of our lives prior to the singularity happening. It's an infinite loop, but our only way of dealing with it.
When you copy a linux binary, it is a linux binary, as well as a copy of it. This whole thing touch at the essence of what "being" means. If you were to instantly copy yourself right now, you would have one instance of you thinking "Well, the copy is not me !" and another one thinking "Whee, I am the digital one, I am the one who get immortality, yay !"
Thinking of people as instanciable things require a little time to adapt to the idea.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Although new developments are happening faster and faster, the energy to generate them (money) is getting greater and greater. So to get to a point where developments happen concurrently or very very close together will require vase amouts of money. Probably more than is currently available.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
I already am a god compared to someone living 200 years ago. I'm not afraid of infection. My children and wife survived the childbirth process easily. Name a topic, any topic in the world, and I can talk intelligently about it (all of us here are pretty much augmented beings, backed by the internet). I've seen the Earth from on top of the clouds. I've seen the sun come up over the Bay in Annapolis in the morning, and watched it go down over the bay in San Francisco in the evening of the same day.
Few people of the past would have thought such things were possible.
Sure, there's some faith, but there's a lot of carefully considered fact involved in the belief as well.
What? Our singular overlords? Our eschatonic overlords.
Is it just me, or does all this poorly-reasoned "singularity" crap have a religious feel to it?
Gee, someone who believes some completely un-provable being exists finds what other people believe is 'humorous'.
That's the height of irony.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Precisely. The only difference from religious people is that the coming of the singularity is something that can be predicted from observable facts, instead of old texts written by self-serving priests of long ago interpreted by self-serving priests of today.
Believe what you want, but I sincerely doubt anything like that will happen when corporate interests keep stiffling innovation.
We're still stuck with primitive programming languages, defective (by design?) platforms, unimplementable document formats (OOXML anyone?), carbon-based power plants, software patents....
There CANNOT be any singularity. The chilling effect of Mankind's stupidity is a factor too great to ignore.
That failing only applies to modern methods of circuit building. Just like tubes had a limitation, but when it was hit, technology didn't stop.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Humans can make small machines, but that completely ignores the fact that we have very limited knowledge about the workings of our cells and we really don't even know what sentient life is.
In the grand scheme of things, we are only a few steps down the road from Qin Shi Huang. Every generation talks up unlimited life spans, and it is always BS.
In other words, be prepared to die like everyone else.
Sure! All I ask is that he not be any younger than me, because that wouldn't be fair. I'm 39. Oh wait, he'd be long dead. Too bad! The prime of their youth, these primitive humans, would last, what, 10 years?
The difference is that technology really could solve pretty much all of our problems. It has a long and verifiable history of solving problems in ways that earlier generations would have described as magical or divine.
Religion, on the other hand, does not do this. The most religion can claim is providing government-like structures and psychotherapy-like benefits. It's sure not moving along the path to curing all diseases and increasing mankind's power over the universe.
So, yeah, there is a rational, historically-supported reason to be excited about one but not the other.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
"Nature doesn't like singularities" That's a quote I often heard form my physics professor. We're physically bound to hit a wall.
provided the dynamo of technological advancement in society is in some way related to scientific breakthrough. The real world does not appear to bear this out, since what we considered advancement is a phenomenon of the existing economic system. The right discovery has to appear at the right time or it falls by the wayside as being unprofitable.
The slavery-based imperialist economies of the past relied on captive expendable human labour and looting. There was no compelling need for mechanical transport when slaves could carry you, no need for extensive infrastructure when the roads were primarily intended to enforce the rule of the empire through the rapid movement of armies. Nor was there any extensive profit in consumer retailing when the majority of the population, locked into feudalism did not have the surplus income to spend. The Romans had an extensive and often surprising level of technology that the traditional teaching classical history fails to address at a high school level. They had fast food similar to burgers but no extensive empire-encompassing franchise with the motto "Id amo", nor did their technological abilities extend much past properly constructed water and sewer systems and roads for the majority of the populace. They had all the resources both physical and intellectual to develop into a technologically advanced society but they did not and could not.
It was not until much later, long after the system that was the Roman Empire had vanished, after the Black Death devastated the populations of Europe that feudalism ended and human labour became a valuable resource. It was at this point the cost effectives of machines became apparent and people were willing to invest time and money in their development and make a profit. The profit part doesn't necessarily appear as the direct result of new knowledge or research. On the contrary, some of the finest example of our technological advancements, anti-biotics and anti-malaria for example are a direct result of military strategic planning and had nothing at all to do with either venture capitalism or pro-bono publico development.
So yes, The Singularity just like The End of History, (or dare I suggest even the Flying Car!) might be very pleasant but also equally difficult to either pin-down precisely or predict accurately.
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No one ever remembers The 13th Floor because it came out the same time as The Matrix. It deals with exactly this subject and is the reason that every so often I go someplace I've never been before... Just to make sure. ;)
But not that it matters, it's the mental capabilities that makes the difference. Suppose that primitive human from 10,000 years ago and yourself were pitted against each other. Let's say the battlefield would include the entire planet, each contestant could pick a random place to start (undisclosed to the other), and the reward would be substantial... say, live out the rest of your live in permanent wealth.
So yes that caveman would beat your head in when he'd get his hands on you, but would you let him? Ofcourse not. The cavemen would be finished before he saw you coming. You'd find him quicker than he'd find you. You'd find those 'advanced weapons' and bring them with you, before the cavemen would know what those weapons are, or how to use them. Starting out on an empty planet would shift the odds in the caveman's direction, but the modern human would probably still win. Why do you think primitive humans are extinct now, even though they where perfectly capable of surviving harsh environments? Because modern humans outsmarted them.
For the same reason, any superhuman intelligent being could kick normal human asses, in one way or another.
Somewhere in the article(s) it mentions that exponential increases in intelligence would probably equate to exponential increases in resources. There are physical limits to intelligence that we'll run into sooner or later--there will be a point where we can't shrink that transistor, or find another part that is smaller that does the same task.
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
It is a religion for all the believers. And there is nothing anyone can say to change their mind. I have argued on scientific and technical basis with many of them, back when they were saying that singularity would happen by 2020 (now they have revised their dates). Funny bunch for sure.
:D.
Many of them base their predictions on Moore's law, which as we know is not even a law but an observational trend.
I on the other hand would be happy if Vista has stable drivers by 2020, let alone if we had "thinking machines" smarter than us
As the island of our knowledge grows, so does the shore of our ignorance.
You are assuming that each generation of intelligences can not only create an intelligence smarter than themselves, but one that is as much smarter than themselves as they are smarter than their predecessors. That is definitely not something which is guaranteed to be true, and I would go so far as to say it is most likely false.
It doesn't matter if your infinite series is always strictly increasing, it's not necessarily going to get to infinity.
For instance, say you manage to create an intelligence twice as intelligent as you. This one puts all its intelligence into creating another intelligence, and manages to create one which is 2.5 times as intelligent as you. That one manages 2.75. And so on, until you top out at three times. No runaway evolution happens, because intelligence turns out to be really hard.
When relays reached max density, tubes appeared. Tubes were shrunk, and at about the time when they couldn't get a lot smaller, transistors appeared. Those shrunk for a while, then IC's appeared. IC's have been shrinking for a while, with various technologies, each able to go smaller than before, driving that change. Now IC's are within reach of maximum density in the 2D zone, but the 3rd dimension beckons, especially to low-power (hence low heat) technologies. Two layers gives a doubling in the same 2d space; four does it again... that's probably good for quite a few doublings before the 3rd dimension becomes unwieldy. In the meantime, can we anticipate what might come next? Biologicals are one possibility; look at the brain. 3d and fits in a funny shape. Brains come in all sizes, and who is to say that the one we have is either the best design or the largest or the fastest? What if materials that work 2x as fast as our neurons are found? Look at the recent development of memristors; how many people saw that coming? Not many! And they're not even in hardware yet. They have the potential to spike memory density up, power down, speed up, and more... because they aren't transistors at all. And they're small. In fact, the smaller they are, the better they seem to work. There's a limit in there somewhere, but still, how cool is that?
Furthermore, Moore's law is just one aspect of technology; we are also experiencing doublings along many other paths (see Ray Kurzweil's observations for details on that) and some of them aren't about materials or hardware, they're about knowledge leveraging next steps. For instance, in the late 1970's, we had microprocessors that were very capable, but we didn't have many kinds of software. If we had it at the time, we could have done more, earlier... nothing but knowledge. But instead, many of these software technologies didn't show up for years. Yet we could take one of those microprocessors (a 6809 or a z80, for instance) and program all *manner* of cool things on them today, were it called for. And build them huge memory spaces, too. To put it another way, with what I know after 40 years of programming, if I could go back in time to 1979, what I now know how to do with microprocessors would make me a very rich man. Technology has come a long way regardless of Moore's law. Technology multiplies itself.
Honestly, there is nothing that falls so flat on my ears as doomlike predictions of technology reaching an unbreachable wall. Not going to happen. What's going to happen is technology will continue to double. The consequences of that are shrouded in mystery, but the one thing that is clear is that there will be extremely significant consequences.
Here's an observation for you: When you have projects that are pendant upon technologies that are experiencing doublings in a particular time period, those projects will typically get 1/2 of the total work done in the last time period.
For example, four time periods of doublings: 1 - 2 4 8 16... a total factor of 31, of which 16 occurred in the last period. It is because of this that projects like the human genome project look stalled at first; half of the work required to get them done will occur in the last doubling period (about a year in that case.) I suspect that's exactly what we're looking at with fusion as well; we're just not far enough up the curve yet.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Doesn't this highlight the fallacy of a continuous "you"? Consciousness is inherently discontinuous, so the idea of a an intrinsic "you" apart from a series of sensory inputs (internal and external) is fallacious.
You're a temporary arrangement of matter sliding towards oblivion in a cold, uncaring universe
I am a different person now than I was ten years ago. That person from ten years ago is dead.
In fact, every moment of the day I die and am recreated again as a slightly different individual.
I am the phoenix and you can too!
* Technology will continue to improve exponentially (it is right now - see Moore's law)
However this will not and cannot continue ag nausium because eventually the laws of thermodynamics catch up with you.
* The brain is a fully deterministic computer.
This is an unproven article of faith and contrary to a lot of evidence which would appear the brain uses at least some semi chaotic processes. Most natural system do.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
All natural systems are deterministic. Those who believe otherwise just want to belive that the soul is a real thing. :)
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Thank you for that. As a translator I have to chuckle when each year companies come out with new machine translation technologies or software that are "even closer to replacing human translators than ever!" They aren't.
It's possible to make machines faster and filled with more brute computing force, but that means they will be able to do the same things, faster and more at once. Unless we get down the entirely new business of studying how our brains actually work and reproducing those processes, instead of dabbling around with complex arrays of on/off circuits, we won't truly get closer to machines that can do the job of actual thinking for us.
The day may come when computers replace human translators like me. But that day will also see the replacement of airplane pilots, surgeons, software creators, soldiers, you name it. All that's left for humans is to engage in pure artistic pursuits . . . and hope that at least a few of us are still interested in growing crops so we have something to eat.
You assume your experience of life is continuous, and there'll be a nice, clean gap in the experience of life of your digital copy. Your digital copy would go "Oh, hey, wow! It worked! It actually transferred my conciousness!", at which point the other you in the corner would say "Whaddaya mean? It was a total failure, I'm still here."
... the only difference is it is wrapped in technology instead of mysticism.Yes, such a trivial difference. Tell you what, I'll try to boil a pot of water using technological means, while you try to do the same using mystical means. We'll see who gets to drink their tea first.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."