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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."
Singularity, that's the thing at the center of a black hole right? What's that got to do with nanotech and AI?
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Lets imagine you can upload your mind into a machine.
It will not be you. It will be a copy. You will still be the one that dies afterwards.
It would be you if a progressive upgrade path could be found from biochemical to mechanical/electrical system.
The copy however will believe that he is is you as he will have no memory of his existence after the "transfer" unlike poor flesh you in the xerox machine.
Who has legal rights until/after fleshy death?
Even then the copy will be subject to mechanical breakdowns, loss of sensation, and other issues interacting with the real world.
Would they want to interact with normal world? Would they prefer a virtual world?
As a society I feel that we are nowhere near ready for such questions, and in any case I strongly suspect individual sanity would not survive transfer.
For a good fictional account of this (there are many) I still hold the Gateway books by Frederick Pohl - and the death of Robinette Broadhead and the society of electronic people stored after death.
In the book, to interact with us really slow and boring humans he creates an electronic avatar and animates it whilst having a fun time in virtual fantasy world, checking on it every while to see if anything interesting has been said and instructing it on what to say next.
I read a paper a few years back (somewhere webby, but i can't remember where) that came to the conclusion ... "If it is at all possible to build a virtual system with enough detail to describe our universe, then it is probable we are in one already."
... giving rise to 1st, 2nd, 3rd,... and n-th tier simulations. ... which inevitably gave rise to the old post, "You're very clever, young man, very clever, but it's turtles all the way down!"
As I remember, the conversation threads then devolved into whether or not it would be possible for one of those virtual systems to, within the simulation, build a virtual simulation with the same resolution
"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." - Napoleon Bonaparte
Not going to happen. We're approaching atomic level composition already. Even with quark composition, the computing capacity of the fastest thing that can be built won't go up that much. Computers will never be more than a 10^15 times faster than they are today. Even quantum computing doesn't solve the NP problem.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
I think that is a bigger challenge than most of fans of any sort of singularity think. Yes, in the big scheme of things could be pretty close, but that "close" could be centuries from now.
Think that in most classic sci-fi books we already should have humanoid bots walking between us, colonized most of the solar system planets (even visited and returned from other stars/galaxies), sent manned probes to jupiter, have flying cars and/or MrFusion (and not as exceptions, but as something that everyone have), etc. There are some "practical" issues that delayed a bit that, wasnt found a way to travel safely faster than light, antigravity wasnt discovered, duplicators just arent there, neither teletransporting (with flies in it or not), even getting a full grown clone with my memory and concience is a little hard to get.
Worse than that, between the practical issues arent just technical ones. Economy, ethical, social, safety issues are as good stopping reaching some utopical sci-fi society as FTL travel.
In this category falls any kind of machine that talks and in fact think like a human, including handling contexts and perceiving reality like human. Is something very common in movies and sci-fi stories, but afaik is still a bit far on time.
Is apparently augmenting our intelligence with way to get more intelligence... I'm so going to laugh if they find out that intelligence is not a "value" that can be increased. Of course raw computing power can be, but that's not intelligence. It's far closer to actually being philisophical view points and the ability to distinguish one from another. They're totally gonna find the world's smartest computer is a philosophy major and sits around doing the electronic equivalent of smoking pot all day. Cuz a smart computer could do that. :)
Soon, if not already, biotech will be able to create genetically modified humans. But it will take a century or so to tell if a given mod was an improvement. It's going to be a very slow development cycle.
The "singularity" will always be somewhere beyond the horizon of our predictive abilities. The flaw with the concept is that somehow this event will hit, like a sonic boom. But as we advance, our connectivity and knowledge advance, and our understanding of the world and ability to predict our future also advance (especially if we start augmenting our minds), so that singularity will always be ahead of us.
From another angle, this is really no different from predictions of rayguns and flying cars decades ago. Have you seen the state of AI and nanotech? It hasn't progressed qualitatively for quite some time. We've got microscopic gears and shitty speech recognition. What makes everyone think that we aren't going to hit some serious physical limits, or that human civilization is stable enough to support this kind of continued advance?
It's just religion. Nerd religion, but still religion.
LS
There is a fine line between being a cultivated citizen and being someone else's crop. - A. J. Patrick Liszkie
Although new developments are happening faster and faster, the energy to generate them (money) is getting greater and greater.
Short term. Thats what inflation does on its own.
Long term. Technology actually saves costs and increases productivity. A single scientist today with a desktop computer and the internet is more productive than 100 in 1908 with slide rules and a large library.
If nothing else, those scientists in 1908 had to deal with the time in looking up materials in their reference sources, do very complex calculations by hand, and if they needed to correspond with their peers they had to deal with the postal service and transatlantic journeys if their letters needed to reach their friends across the pond.
So while the costs appear to increase (probaly due to inflation and energy costs) productivity increases just as fast if not faster.
And speaking of energy crisis... I believe the current crisis will actually benefit alternative technologies and actually force companies to really consider more efficient ways of using and eventually creating their own energy.
Imagine if you would a world were solar cells or so efficient you don't need to even have to bother with a real power grid. In reality, I don't think the singularity will be created by a bunch of nerds with fancy algorithms but by corporations who create technologies out of competitive necessity.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
I read an excellent short story on that subject here: I don't know, Timmy, being God is a big responsibility
Understand, I'm not claiming that progress in creating smaller and cheaper circuits will suddenly come to a halt. There's too much economic demand for that to happen. But development will have to switch to new technologies, and progress almost certainly will be slower.
Every kind of growth has limits. If it didn't bacteria would still be the most conspicuous life form on the planet. Science and technology are no different. They're dependent on natural resources, an educated pool of skilled workers, and a lot of other factors. Then it is a fair assumption that we will eventually design a superbrain. The superbrain will design a super-duper brain, and the chain reaction (singularity) will be upon us. I can't wait! Again with the silly curve drawing. "Smarter" isn't something you can make just by packing in enough circuits. People don't even know what "smarter" is. Probably they'll figure it out eventually. But it's already clear that "smarter" is more complicated than any technology we'll see in the next century or so.
You don't need unbounded recursion. If simulated universe A is simulating universe B then it makes sense for the machine running A to optimize computation by running B directly on the physical hardware. We are all running directly under the root node.
I suspect the root doesn't have locality enforcement (which can be observed by measuring the upper limit on the speed of light) or entropy like we do . Imagine how powerful a computer could be if its elements could communicate instantaneously over light years of distance.