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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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Mankind has been progressing technologically in steps that seem to get closer and closer together. The theory is that at some point, technological advances will begin to happen all at once, with the emergence of things like sentient AI and usable quantum engineering. Basically, technological transcendence.
It's a pretty silly idea, but everyone has their own vision of nirvana.
What's the value of information that you don't know?
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.
People who consider the singularity something to be worried about missed the point and/or watch too many movies. A technological singularity is not a world-ending scenario. It's the first step on the road to divinity.
IIRC the term singularity can refer to anyplace that predictive systems appear break down.
I was listening to a talk on hypercanes quite some time ago, and the lecturer was using the term singularity to describe the point beyond which the weather system became self-sustaining, a situation for which the predictive equations could not account. Once the predictive systems are expanded the 'singularity' is 'pushed back' to the point where the systems break down again.
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.
Look it up on Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity It's the point where machines will be able to evolve technology faster than human thinking can. So, it's the point where we are no longer the most significant sentient race on this planet.
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 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.
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.
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.
According to Kurzweil's vision the move to intelligent mass following the singularity will be relatively swift as all of the existing computational power will be dedicated to bridging the divides between the intelligence and the medium.
It is suggested that once the intelligence and the medium are one, then force will simply be an expression of 'thought,' and could only be instructive, and not destructive.
Just a thought, and not my own at that.
Gee, someone who believes some completely un-provable being exists finds what other people believe is 'humorous'.
That's the height of irony.
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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.
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.
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
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
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.
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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Ray Kurzweil, in his book The Singularity Is Near (the only book I've read on the topic), sets the date for around 2045. He makes further predictions for things before that; here's a nice list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Kurzweil#Future_Predictions
Don't blame me -- I voted for Roslin.
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.
The term "singularity" for the center bit of a black hole was stolen from the existing definition of "the point at which the model fails", because it was the point at which the model fails. The usage in TFA is proper.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
... 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."