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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?
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.
http://www.simulation-argument.com/classic.html That's what you're thinking of. And honestly, it does make some sense, but I'm not sure if replacing God with unbounded recursion is much more pleasing.
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.