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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?
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
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.
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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
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.
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.
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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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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.
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. ;)
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.
says it all
End of line
... 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."