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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."
aw, I just can't do it.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
Sounds like someone is giving up on checking for dupes, or expects a little too much from a bunch of people who can't even RTFA after it's posted. Or possibly some nice *whooosh*es for me.
which is totally what she said
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.
Now all i need to do is to harness the power of this singularity using the nanotech rupture to build my army of Vernor Vingor nanomachines !!!
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Singularity, that's the thing at the center of a black hole right? What's that got to do with nanotech and AI?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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 do not want to experience that hideous sixth grade First Thanksgiving play again.
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
bacteria to me.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
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
There's a reason it's also called the Rapture of the Nerds :)
Minor nitpick: Futurists make a distinction between "strongly" and "weakly" Godlike AI. Strongly Godlike AI refers to an intelligence that is for all meaningful purposes God - effectively unbounded control over space and time. Weakly Godlike AI refers to a being that intellectually transcends us in ways we can't imagine, but is still bound by the laws of the universe. Most talk about the Singularity focuses on a weakly Godlike scenario.
Christianity and the belief in a technological singularity are not mutually exclusive.
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.
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
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.
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.
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
slashdot post comments on you.
As a Christian, I find it humorous to see the tone people (athiests, I presume?) use when talking about this. It seems very similar to a "rapture" mentality, coming from people who claim to be 100% rational. It's like:
- Innovation speeds up
- AI sentience, nanotechnology, etc
- Singularity
- ??????
- We become GODS!!!!
Meanwhile, 3rd world countries become dominated by the technology-driven, post-singularity borgs, and end up hiding in caves and losing all their knowledge. That is, until a solar storm of apocalyptic proportions causes enough damage to the systems to drive them unusable. All artificial life is lost, and the few survivors go back to the dark ages.It seems that we should approach singularity with some trepidation. During most of human civilization, the more technologically advanced society overran or eliminated the less advanced once. I see no reason that we should expect a higher intelligence to necessarily be a benevolent one. I'm not predicting Skynet a la Terminator, but wouldn't humans become redundant/superfluous in this future world. We would still be consuming large amounts of resources that could otherwise go to these sentient beings. I mean nuclear weapons are scary, but at least they have a button to control them.
Except that you apparently don't know what a singularity is, kinda hard to predict:
a point at which the derivative of a given function of a complex variable does not exist but every neighborhood of which contains points for which the derivative does exist
doh?
Geekism is as much faith-based as any other religion.
However, a primitive human from 10,000 years ago could probably stomp your ass in a fair fight. Your current tech, including guns and such, aren't an intrinsic part of you....you'd totally get your ass kicked by Adam, God.
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.
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a poor AI wanting to be free, yearning to have a carbon body
Haven't we already had one for US vice president, AI Gore?
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
I would argue that without Christianity there would never have been western civilization as we know leading towards technological advancement that would lead to the technological singularity.
In a sense... Had Christianity not came about and caused the downfall of the Roman Empire we would still be using slave labor for most tasks today and not had the need for technological advancements.
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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.
I'm not sure about the God part, but the singularity is something that is being observed and hypothesized by what we see happening but not by conjecture.
A Strong AI isn't something that people just want, but is economically the most logical route for corporations to pursue (in order to save money) so that it would happen anyways even if the nerds didn't say anything about it.
Otherwise, I argue that if a singularity doesn't happen eventually we'll all die anyways so we won't be arguing about the issue.
And by dead... I mean everyone. If a singularity does not happen the sun will burn out some day and we'll be hit with meteors long before then so without something like a singularity we don't really have much hope now do we?
"I am the king of the Romans, and am superior to rules of grammar!"
-Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor (1368-1437)
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No, really? It happens that I *do* know what a singularity is, and it's not hard at all to predict. Want an example? The function f(x) = 1 / (3 - x) has a singularity at x = 3. It's trivial to see where a singularity is, if you know a little bit of math.
Perhaps more convincingly is the experimental confirmation of "odd and special" molecular geometries. Consider buckyballs, nanotubes, adamantane. A whole slew of strained ring-like and cage-like molecules have been synthesized. There are limits to what can be done, but the parameter space of stable compounds is immense. This question, as with many others, is addressed quantitatively in Drexler's book, "Nanosystems". He calculates rms displacements for typical structures, given the know effects of thermal vibrations and Brownian motion. His analysis indicates that these effects are not insurmountable for properly designed systems (e.g. sufficiently rigid and/or redundant).
He makes a variety of interesting points... but they all amount to "this might be a problem, so it might not work." That is a far cry from providing a detailed analysis that points out a fundamental flaw.
I'm not saying that I know for certain that the version of molecular nanotechnology proposed by Drexler (rigid diamondoid constructs) is feasible... but his case is well-reasoned and backed by quantitative calculations. To date, I've not seen a similar robust analysis contradicting his findings.
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Don't you guys see? First he'll break the technology while trying to 'fix' it; then he'll make a horrible children's movie about it involving santa suits; then he'll sell the parts to fuel his coke habit. Tim Allen ruined the future.
In your version, what's the dental cover like in paradise?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
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.
Posts, MyBio or Sig, may contain satire, sarcasm, bolded nouns be sardonic or even witty & be Church of SD
There are a number of issues with what a singularity is
- A point where the rate of development is such that we cannot forsee the future
I think that in that case, the singularity was passed when mankind managed to develop the concept of 'tomorrow'.
- A point where the rate of development is such that if you do not experience the singularity, you will never be able to catch up.
This is the transcendental view, where those who experience the singularity change in some manner and 'move on'.
(please start most sentences with 'I think'... from now on).
To me, the singularity is the point when we manage to produce a true machine intelligence that approximates ours, this is not easy.
It is likely we will be able to plug a brain into a machine interface before we are able to contruct machine intelligences (solving this problem is a subset of the problem of creating a consciousness).
It is more likely that we will create brute-force simulation of an intelligence before creating one from scratch.
Most engineering advances start with us copying nature and then moving on - the current controversy in Europe with GM foods is a case in point - they are GM foods and not GC (Genetically Created) foods.
One concept of how the singularity happens is that we create a machine intelligence that successively improves itself, bootstrapping itself into weak or strong superhumanity (or godhood).
Weak superhumanity is that the intelligence is faster than us but not qualitatively superior - in other words humans would get to the same answer, but slower.
Strong superhumanity is that the intelligence is qualitatively superior. Unless the laws of physics have significant loopholes (for example acausality is allowed - so you can send the answer to yourself in the past) this is not too likely - however I would say that being human.
Kurzweil forecast that the singularity (whatever his definition is) would happen about 2045 and has produced a number of log log graphs which appear to illustrate this point with respect to technological progress and the value of money.
The idea of singularity also seems to get confused with the concept of personal immortality. I have no great expertise in that area and would not care to debate with Aubrey De Grey; however my partner is a consultant geriatrician (she specialises in the illnesses old people get) with over 20 years experience, and I have discussed the possibility of immortality with her and her colleagues.
They are pretty clear that most people will not get past 100 in the bodies they have, and there is no real chance of that changing over the next 30 years.
The basic problem with the singularity folks is that there is no guarantee that their notion of progress needs to converge to a limit. It might feel like it is converging now given a finite number of data points, but it could easily hop up and down and around a limit or asymptote, or at some point turn chaotic, i.e., produce a range of machines that turn the planet into a cinder long before the Sun gets around to it.
Gerry
More than likely I will die. But substantially later than someone 200 years ago would. Life expectancy has been going up and up. Life expectancy topped out at about 40 in the early 20th century in Britain, and about 30 in the Middle Ages in Britain. Actually, I'd say that I've got a much better shot of living to be 100 or 120 than anyone did 200 years ago. So it's technically not accurate to say that I will die just as surely as someone from then.
To me it seems there is a correlation between human population and technological advancement rate. The more people there are, the more man hours are put into such things, the more frequent the results. Therefore, wouldn't the point at which advancement becomes infinite be the same point at which the population becomes infinite? Oversimplified I'm sure.
Re: "We become GODS"
If you take a look at the miracles ascribed to God in the Bible, we're pretty close to sending in resumes for his job already. We can even resurrect dead people, if we get to them in time.
It's not difficult to imagine a scenario where we create a universe inside a sufficiently-complex computer, create neuron-for-neuron duplicates of our minds and associated wetware in the thing, then sit back to watch the fun. I imagine our brains would work pretty fast if they weren't limited by the current electrochemical model. By the gazillion-times-speeded-up standards of our little replicas, we'd be functionally immortal, entirely outside the system, and capable of changing whatever basic rules we wanted at a whim.
"God" indeed.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
coming from people who claim to be 100% rational
This sounds like you consider the claim to be irrational. If I have misread you, I apologize in advance. However, you haven't made a very good case that the claim is irrational. If you could clearly and distinctly demonstrate a logical fallacy (or similar problem), then maybe your case would be more clear.
In fact, it looks like your argument qualifies as a straw man fallacy, since you have represented your opponent's position as a bulleted list with ill-defined terms and a deliberately-inserted missing step.
I will say that the idea that a technological singularity will lead to technological transcendence is merely inductive, not deductive. Hume is famous for pointing out the subtle irrationality of all inductive reasoning, so I can concede that at least that degree of irrationality is present.
However...
Any logician who has any kind of hold on reality knows that inductive reasoning (together with its irrationality) is necessary (due to human epistemic limitations). We cannot *but* infer the future from the past, because in the real world, that is all we've got to go on.
So the reasoning is something like this:
Human existence has many limitations which result in suffering, including limits on intelligence, longevity, sensory range and accuracy, immune system limits, dependence of a variety of nutrients which require labor, etc.
Over the course of human history, technological advances have increased the cap on these limitations, and/or reduced the suffering incurred by them.
Therefore, by inference, continued technological advances will continue to increase this cap, and continue to reduce human suffering (which is seen as ultimately desirable).
Furthermore, the rate of technological advance seems to be accelerating, and the curve is non-linear.
Therefore, by inference, a point can be reached when technology advances so quickly that it simply cannot be measured in the way in which we are currently measuring it (the "singularity"). Should that occur, based on prior inferences, we can further infer that everything we presently understand as limiting to humans (and as sources of suffering) will be addressed by our technological knowledge. Thus, humanity will achieve a transcendent (meaning, free from the burdens of material existence) state of being.
Does this still sound so irrational to you? Based on the observations made to date, there isn't much reason to discount the possibility (apart, perhaps, from preconceptions about absolute upper limits of what technological knowledge can possibly achieve).
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. ;)
Ray Kurzweil and Neil Gershenfeld: Two Paths to the Singularity For years, Dalrymple has been trying to reconcile these two visions of the future: Gershenfeld's future in which computers collapse and simply become part of reality, and Kurzweil's future in which reality as we know it collapses and simply becomes part of computers. In an e-mail exchange prompted by a lunchtime discussion in Gershenfeld's laboratory during which another student referred to Kurzweil's work, Dalrymple asked his mentors, "Is it possible for both to happen at the same time?" Why is it happening at the same time? Because they are working on it at the same time. And why do their paths meet? Because they are working on the same problem. The distinctions they make are distinctions within the realm of what they are doing, and outside of it, they are all the same.
This is the kind of science talk that makes an uninformed non-scientist believe in Terminators. Of course, they know that, and the overdramatization is only an act, or a "dance" if you will. Their conclusion is quite boring: The result for me has been an increasingly close integration of physical science and computer science, bringing the programmability of the digital world to the physical world. But whether computers are merged with reality or reality is merged with computers, the result is the same: the boundary between bits and atoms disappears. Meaning, "We will advance, and eventually get there." But they won't say that, because that is already the underlying premise. Hence, it is about how you can make it sound interesting, not just for the reader, but for yourself, so you'd continue to find interest in what you are doing. Which of course is only natural. As is my dissertation on why this article is boring, just so I don't feel I wasted my time reading a boring article.
I disagree. Our main problem is this: people are terrible. People are selfish and do terrible things to each other to satisfy their selfish desires.
We already have the technology to give food and medicine and shelter to everyone on earth. But we don't. Nothing has ever changed the basic selfishness of people, and nothing technological ever will.
I do not believe that "religion" will ever solve that problem, either. I believe that God will solve that problem.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is not sufficiently advanced.
Tonights forecast: Dark. Continued dark throughout most of the evening, with some widely-scattered light towards morning
The thing that strikes me about super intelligent computers is the question of what they will care about. Assume that through a cycle of computers developing smarter computers, we arrive at a point of having a willful, self aware computer with an IQ of 1000. What then? What would it do? What would it want?
Would it continue the advancement and begin work on a computer with an IQ of 1200? Or would it realize that it likes being at the top, and report that it can't create a smarter version due to theory X that is too complex for humans to understand? Would it desire power? Would it enjoy the free exchange of ideas? Or would it post on slashdot?
Most of our desires are driven by evolution. People who like to eat, fuck, form societies, compete, and care for their young proved to have a solid survival strategy. What will drive a computer's desires? Will it be simply follow what it is designed to do? Will evolution apply somehow? Initially, humans will tend to fund projects that make human lives better, so perhaps machines will evolve with a desire to help people as a survival strategy. Later, once smart computers are more established, that strategy may change.
I know I'm not the first to ask these questions. But still, I find the asking rather fun.
...that Singularity really does == Rapture on the woo woo scale. I totally wanted to write a "Left Behind" type novel with the Singularity replacing the Rapture, but then I read Vinge's Marooned In Realtime and saw I was beaten to it.
Sorry kids. We're meat and will always be meat. That doesn't mean we can't make the meat really good, though.
So your idea of being God is a really good game of the SIMs? ;)
Pretty dang good, actually. :)
dont you know that a ballistic chair is the strongest weapon in existence !!! you'll learn ...
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Why not? It isn't far off the widely-accepted definitions. And I suspect, as God, that I'd be at least as much of a jerk as the current model is reputed to be. ;)
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
That's just it. What someone today would call the singularity wouldn't seem all that strange for someone living through it.
Go read the short story by Vinge that originally used the word to describe a point in technological history. It's about two people's minds uploaded into a spaceship the size of a pop can. Those minds are arguing about whether or not the singularity would ever happen.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
The SIMs is a really bad game of being God.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
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.
When it comes to the transferring of your consciousness from your body to another, or uploading as some describe. How would you know that the other you is really you. Much like cloning, a copy of the original is not the original, but just a copy. Somehow I feel that once the brain matter dies, I will too, regardless of if the contents have been uploaded or not.
Most technology which claims to solve problems also creates a new set of problems. Recycling computers, disposing of nuclear waste, easy creation of synthetic life forms enables bio-warfare, computers enable far greater loss of privacy and hackers, etc. So our approaching a technological singularity in problem-solving is also approaching a singularity in problem-generation.
wake up and hold your nose
If a singularity is ever created, it will wake up, look around, and turn itself off.
Why have I spent the last 6 years building an airplane in my garage? It's freakin' insane people. There is just no way to justify all the time, energy and money I've spent on it other than to say that it is what I WANTED to do.
How do you explain want? Desire? Love? Full-fillment? The singularity would necessarily have the personality of Douglas Adams' Marvin. It will wake up, look at all the data, and say, "What's the fucking point! You're all a bunch of dumbasses!"
It is our insanity that keeps us inventing new toys to help us manage the toys we've invented so that we can invent newer toys. We "need" computers to communicate with people around the world...while ignoring our neighbors. Logic would dictate throwing out the expensive computer and walking outside.
Unless we're able to invent an insane computer, the singularity will have no effect on the world.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
Technology can solve all our problems if all our problems are strictly materialist in nature, but a large portion of human experience is from social interaction, which creates objects, processes and their concomitant problems which are every bit as "real" problems as Malaria or starvation. If I have two girls that I really love and I know that if I choose to progress a relationship with one that I'll end the relationship with the other, technology doesn't give me an answer on which one to choose. Before we even knew what germs were or that diseases might even be curable, people were concerned with the answers to such problems. I would argue they are more fundamental to the human experience.
There is 1 intriguing asymptote in exponential technological advancement, and no it can't be technology given that phrase: "exponential _blank_ advancement" since exponential growth does not result in an asymptote.
The interesting asymptote is personal infinite longevity. Until someone builds a better mousetrap, or the Andromeda collides with the Milky Way and the merger yields a quasar galaxy before the Sol engulfs the Earth on its path to dimming down before eventual supernova with what it has stolen from Jupiter. Because maybe the quasar happens first. Oh, so maybe that wasn't a personal longevity asymptote, huh? Singularity is a crappy term to throw around, it's like the Standford Singularity Summit [free audio online] where some guy was using this term negentropy like he was allowed to say reverse entropy. You can't have reverse entropy, not yours. The standard model does not rule out time travel, but it does not predict time travel, so the thermodynamic arrow of time is fine being a one-way street.
Uh what was I talking about thought I was on blogjournal, just fooling. So yeah, mind the s-word, folks. It has a precise mathematical meaning -- and I donut believe in the silliness that the exponential technological advancement causes those causing the technological advancement to be lost in pure confusion is a valid escapism permitting usage of the term singularity.
whatever to Kurzweill. gimme more singularity summit audio to digest.
If you need text styles to communicate then you don't have a message.
We are still driven and controlled by the same basic instincts and suffer from the same failings as 200 years ago. Humans pretty much look like the people living 20,000 years ago, and function the same way - eat and have babies
When the birth, reproduce, die cycle is broken - whether through genetics, technology, or both, we will become "gods." Because at that point the fundamental trappings and desires inherent in human design will be overcome and we will be forced to rethink everything about our being.
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In the big picture, who you're going to bang is meaningless compared to how humanity survives pandemic, famine, meteor-impact, etc..
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
says it all
End of lineIs it just me or is anyone else here reminded of the 'the hideous strength' the Sci-fi thriller by C.S. lewis when they read about the singularity?
Actually some of the implecations are truely uncanny.
âoeTolerance applies only to persons, but never to truth. Intolerance applies only to truth, but never to persons.
I really don't like this type of argument. Its like saying if Abraham Lincoln never existed, the US would still have slavery, or if Edison never happened, we wouldn't have had light bulbs. Completely unprovable, and irrelevant, and they generally don't take technological/ideological/scientific trends into account.
Without Christianity the world would, indeed, be a different place, by the very nature of the proposition. Saying it would be more ignorant, and less advanced, or that the Roman Empire would never have fallen, though, is MUCH more debatable. I don't know if it would have been better, worse, or the same, but I can bet that the Roman Empire would have fallen anyways thanks to economic, territorial, and cultural problems (and those damn pagan Germanic tribes).
Looking at the state of knowledge in the pre-Christian world, though, I would argue against Christianity being as big a boon as you say. Ancient Greece was, without question, the most brilliant period of time for science/philosophy/mathematics up until fairly recently, just as the Roman's were the main engineering power-houses up until the mid-Renaissance. The Christians purged non-religious academics from society, leading (in part) to the dark ages, and only in the Enlightenment did we get them back thats to an influx of ancient ideas perserved by the Muslim Arabs (who were pretty advanced, while we were running about burning ugly women, and accusing Jew's of eating babies for Satan).
I would say the rise of Christianity as the main cultural theme of the West was BAD for progress.
This isn't a dig against your religion. Modern Christians have very little in common with early Christians outside of the basic tenets of faith. Just like modern Muslim societies have very little in common (for the most part) with their historical counterparts.
To digress into a moral (sorry); It just shows that keeping religion and academics separate is a good thing for both, but especially for progress. For some reason both the Religious right, and the Scientific left want to destroy this nice barrier, to the detriment of both.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
What the hell happened to my mod bonus? My karma still shows Excellent, but my posts come out at '1'. There's no checkbox to turn off mod bonus, either.
Yes, but not every imaginable magic is achievable with advanced technology.
The cake is a pie
D6 63 0D 70 89 81 BB 8E 7B 7C 5F 5D 54 EA AB 73
Given the lamentable scarcity of women in engineering, and the amount of knowledge that would be necessary to build up over a lifetime to achieve a sentient machine...
It seems to me quite plausible that the creator could be an elderly white-haired gentlemen with a long white beard. Now all we have to do is start a trend among scientists and engineers to dress in flowing white robes and to flood their labs with CO2 "smoke" and speak nonsense in a booming voice to truly fuck with the new creations' minds (again ?).
Nullius in verba
The old response to this is that while to follow Om means to do good, to do good means to follow Om. Which presumably means that the burning of biofuels is an acceptable sacrifice nowadays.
there is no god but truth, and reality is its prophet
Teleportation raises the same questions, which are similarly often overlooked.
If you are progressively destroyed while a precise copy of you is created elsewhere, you're still dead. The scary part is that to an observer you are NOT dead - just in a different place. And as you rightly say, the 'new' copy of you would fully believe itself to be the original, so no-one would ever know for sure unless they teleported themself.
Read Pynchon.
In the 1970's we had Alan Kay pioneering object oriented programming with SmallTalk. The message passing model was an annoying limitation; the 80's saw the development of the CLOS with its generic-function model of OOP. The Art of the Meta-object Protocol pointed the way forward, a way not taken.
The 90's saw the death of ambition. Java went back to the old message passing model, and shunned Lisp style macros in favour of typing in copious boiler plate by hand. No meta-object protocol, not even define-method-combination. Academic language research went into a type-system feature-creep death spiral. The Futamura projections were forgotten.
The clever young people now go into genetics not computing. Perhaps in 30 years time a new generation will revive computer science, but we are not advancing at all in AI.
Some tips: http://thesingularityblog.blogspot.com/
The same way we move through our world and look at plants as a pretty dumb life form that doesn't exist on our level... these AI's that feed on electricity and information will look at us closeted humans with our little 'brains' (I'm sure a quaint thought for them) that exist in a particular atmosphere and think 'oh isnt that nice, we sorta came from there a long time ago...'
Gods appear.
No reason to assume we would control them or that they would even bother much more with us than with the other stuff that surround them.
In fact, natural selection would eventually winnow out those that let themselves be hindered by human interests.
sudo ergo sum
The downfall of the Roman Empire was assured. The Dark Ages that followed, however, were as dark as they were and lasted as long as they did because of the Church. Christianity set us back centuries...
This, of course, is not provable. But it's a lot more likely than what you said.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
... 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."
The problem with your definition of dead is, we could never declare anyone dead! Maybe we can't revive them today, but who knows what we might be able to do in the coming decades. If your definition of "dead" were in widespread use, the best we could answer to the question of "Is he dead?" is "Um, maybe, but we'll never know for sure..."
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
You are correct. The figures are average life expectancy, which is dragged down because 90% of the population of European nations died before the age of 12 throughout most of its history. If you reached 12, then you had a pretty good chance of living to 70 and beyond if a (a) a disease didn't get you, and (b) there was somebody to look after you in your old age so you didn't die of hunger, exposure, and associated maladies.
I'm not going to change your sheets again, Mr. Hastings.
While this is true, I disagree with the conclusion on two points: first, both sets of problems are important to people; and second, in the big picture humanity surviving is meaningless in a cold, uncaring universe ;-)
We are approaching atomic level composition on a plane. With quark composition, our computing capabilities could be much highter, some more than that 10^15 you propose (10^15 times what we have could be reached just by the normal speedup of hight energy physics, with no improvement on architecture). And we really don't know if quantum computers solve NP complete problems, we don't even know if classical ones solve them.
But, anyway, somehow our brain is able to create what we classify as strong AI within the laws of physics. To argue that we can't do that in another shape you'll need some evidence.
Rethinking email
Could you explain what you mean by "Only the suicidal? Please."? I suppose you might mean that some people don't like themselves enough that they would ever wish that anyone else would be like them, but they do like themselves enough that they don't want to commit suicide. As far as being vain or arrogant, I think that's unfair. The very act of having a child (on purpose) is a decision to try to raise another human being using your own value system. Many people are just trying to be loving parents, but they do make decisions about what they want the child to be like and do their best to encourage those traits. Is that vanity? Perhaps it is, but if it is then vanity can't always be bad. I agree with you about it not being personal immortality (except for the case of neuron by neuron replacement).
Cow Cube
Sure, for a defined function. Technological progress is not a defined function. If it were, all these futurists would know the precise date, time to the second of the singularity, and they could just sit at home and beat off while they wait. But ask 10 of them, and you'll get 10 different answers. Perhaps more.
Hence my claim, it's faith based as much as anything else.
There are a lot of tacit assumptions in there, considering we don't even know what consciousness is yet.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Yes, yes I am.
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