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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."
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.
The real entertainment begins when we figure out that we are already living in the singularity, and that it is going to end soon. That is, a plateau is at least as likely an outcome of a hockey stick graph as a singularity. Hard physical limits and all that noise.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I think you're missing the point of the singularity. Mankind has progressed at a rate limited by his brain, which is determined by genetics. Our brains have a bounded capacity and rate of operation, and our brain can evolve at only a very slow rate. Therefore, our rate of advancement has been bounded.
On the other hand, if we develop beings with an artificial intelligence equal to the smartest scientists, they could potentially develop a second generation that would be improved. That generation could operate more quickly and be smarter, and develop a third generation even more quickly. Essentially, the limit to our rate of advancement would be removed, and that would cause technological advances to happen very quickly. In a short period of time, we could find ourselves surrounded by beings that seem like gods to us. I think it's less a matter of whether it will happen, and more a matter of when and how it will happen.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
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