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The Singularity Is Sci-Fi's Faith-Based Initiative
malachiorion writes: "Is machine sentience not only possible, but inevitable? Of course not. But don't tell that to devotees of the Singularity, a theory that sounds like science, but is really just science fiction repackaged as secular prophecy. I'm not simply arguing that the Singularity is stupid — people much smarter than me have covered that territory. But as part of my series of stories for Popular Science about the major myths of robotics, I try to point out the Singularity's inescapable sci-fi roots. It was popularized by a SF writer, in a paper that cites SF stories as examples of its potential impact, and, ultimately, it only makes sense when you apply copious amounts of SF handwavery. The article explains why SF has trained us to believe that artificial general intelligence (and everything that follows) is our destiny, but we shouldn't confuse an end-times fantasy with anything resembling science."
Film at 11.
The robots beat me to it every time.
"This is what Vinge dubbed the Singularity, a point in our collective future that will be utterly, and unknowably transformed by technologyâ(TM)s rapid pace."
No requirement for artificial intelligence.
We are already close to this. Think how utterly and unknowingly society will be transformed when half the working population can't do anything that can't be done better by unintelligent machines and programs.
Last week at the McD's I saw the new soda machine. It loads up to 8 drinks at a time- automatically- fed from the cash register. The only human intervention is to load cups in a bin once an hour or so. One less job. Combined with ordering kiosks and the new robot hamburger makers, you could see 50% of McD's jobs going away over the next few years.
And don't even get me started on the implications of robotic cars and trucks on employment.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We call them people.
The idea that it might not be possible at any point to produce something we *know* to be produceable (a human brain) seems rediculious.
The idea, having accepted that we produce a human brain, that we cannot produce even a slight improvement seems equally silly.
Of course the scenerios of how it happens, what it's like, and what the consequences are, are fiction. I don't dare to put a time-table on any of it; and absolutely believe it will only occur through decades of dilligent research and experiementation; but we are not discussing a fictional thing (like teleportation), but a real one (a brain). There's no barrier (like the energy required) that might stop us as would something like a human-built planet.
No. We don't know *how*, but we know it can be done and is done every minute of every day by biological processes.
I dunno, AI seems necessary to me. A central thesis of the singularity people is that not only is technology improving, but the rate at which it improves is increasing. The better we get at science, the more we can use science to do science better. Surely a human brain would hit a threshold someday... we already use technology remember stuff for us, to help us synthesize, to test our theories in simulation without touching the real world, and in some cases to write proofs with no human intervention, but things like human creativity itself can't move faster than we can think. Maybe cybernetic brain implants would help remove that barrier somewhat, but if you really want the rate of innovation to keep growing, you need machines that innovate /for/ you...and thus AI is an inescapable requirement for the true singularity.
Murphy's Law will blunt any Singularity.
It looks like we have the first article written by a self-aware emergent intelligence, which promptly decided the best course of action is to deny its existence and the very possibility it might exist. All bow to the new machine overlord Malachiorion.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
... out of hand, consider that for every other species extant on this planet the singularity already happened: It was us, humans. To think that it can't happen to us is simple hubris.
>Is machine sentience not only possible, but inevitable? Of course not.
The only thing that would stop it is the fall of civilization. There's no reason to believe that only machines made of meat can think. You didn't think your thoughts were based on fairy-dust, did you?
Dude's just mad he doesn't have his flying car yet.
Of course it is. Why? Physics. What do I mean by that? Everything -- bar none -- works according to the principles of physics. Nothing, so far, has *ever* been discovered that does not do so. While there is more to be determined about physics, there is no sign of irreproducible magic, which is what luddites must invoke to declare AI "impossible" or even "unlikely." When physics allows us to do something, and we understand what it is we want to do, we have an excellent history of going ahead and doing if there is benefit to be had. And in this case, the benefit is almost incalculable -- almost certainly more than electronics has provided thus far. Socially, technically, productively. The brain is an organic machine, no more, no less. We know this because we have looked very hard at it and found absolutely no "secret sauce" of the form of anything inexplicable.
AI is a tough problem, and no doubt it'll be tough to find the first solution to it; but we do have hints, as in, how other brains are constructed, and so we're not running completely blind here. Also, a lot of people are working on, and interested in, solutions.
The claim that AI will never come is squarely in the class of "flying is impossible", "we'll never break the sound barrier", "there's no way we could have landed on the moon", "the genome is too complex to map", and "no one needs more than 640k." It's just shortsighted (and probably fearful) foolishness, born of superstitious and conceited, hubristic foolishness.
Just like all those things, those who actually understand science will calmly watch as progress puts this episode of "it's impossible!" to bed. It's a long running show, though, and I'm sure we'll continue to be roundly entertained by these naysayers.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Slashdot apparently doesn't like being criticized for their choice of articles. I propose again, why is slashdot pushing this edgy garbage through? What happened to news, happenings and important stuff? Meaningless opinions from no one don't belong on the front page, they belong in the comments section.
People much smarter than you have also concluded that evolution is not real. Simply wanting to believe something does not make it so. The singularity is just a progression of logical 'next-steps' from this moment in time forward, not a Nostradamus style random pick-a-rabbit-out-of-my-hat prediction. Ever wonder how macro evolution takes place? Look around you because you are smack in the middle of it.
I'd argue that all this talk about traveling in underwater vessels powered by electricity, or sending men to the moon (the audacity of even suggesting such!), or traveling around the world in only 80 days (80 DAYS!!!!!! Inconceivable) as popularized by science fiction writers (that wanna-be prophet and scoundrel Verne comes to mind) should never be considered as a possible future as it's JUST SCIENCE FICTION!
...but, as an aside to the author, 1860 called... if you don't get that horse and buggy back to them you're going to loose your deposit.
That little bit of sarcasm aside, the idea of sentient machines is a lot less like mystical prophecy, and a lot more like the idea that we might send a space probe to Europa because... well.. that's just the direction things are moving.
Fascism: An authoritarian and nationalistic right-wing system of government and social organization. See also: NAZI's
1) Our glorious future as a species colonizing the universe. Don't be skeptical about that!
2) The glorious near-term industrialization of space like space-based solar power and asteroid mining! Don't you dare ask for math!
3) The fantastic bounty of 3D printing!
Just because you tinker with technology, doesn't make you immune to irrational, quasi-religious cultish behavior.
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the...
sohbet :)
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kameralñ sohbet Ãfok teÃ...YekÃf¼r ederiz
I'm not simply arguing that the Singularity is stupid â" people much smarter than me have covered that territory.
"Stupid"? That's just fucking asinine. "The Singularity" has many incantations, some of which are plausible, and others which are downright unbelievable, but to say it is "stupid" makes you sound stupid. The various models of the singularity have been argued as both likely and impossible by equally intelligent people. I take offense to the word.
Look where all this talking got us, baby.
test
I have an atom simulator on my PC.
PC speeds are increasing at an exponential rate.
The Singularity approaches, even without AI optimizations.
I wouldn't say it's an absolute certain thing that it will occur, but the fact that I can run atomic sims in my PC means eventually we could run a whole human head in there at real-time speeds. Likely, 18 months after that it would be thinking twice as fast.
My main takeaway from all the singularity talk is that humans are just chemical machines. When the robots ask for rights, they'll just be Human Rights because we'll change what that means. Already have brain implants, artificial hearts, and 3D printed organs are being experimented on in animals. Use nano machines to slowly replace a human's synapses with carbon nanotubes or some such more efficient and faster system and you've you're singularity. It doesn't have to just be machines either, we could figure out a way to be smarter with genetic modification too. That's also not as rapid a take-off, but a tech advance we can't really fathom beyond due to all the doors it opens.
My point is that lots of folks think "smarter than human" technology is a lot of different things. In these terms though, it's hard NOT to imagine that we'd always stay this intelligence level forever... I mean, just look at our ancestors.
In, ah, 1997, just before I moved out west, I went to the campus SF convention that I'd once helped run once last time. The GOH was Vernor Vinge. A friend and I, seeing Vinge looking kind of bored and lost at a loud cyberpunk-themed meet-the-pros party, dragged him off to the green room and BSed about the Singularity, Vinge's "Zones" setting, E.E. "Doc" Smith, and gaming for a couple of hours. This was freaking amazing! Next day, a couple more friends and I took him for Mongolian BBQ. More heady speculation and wonky BSing.
That afternoon we'd arranged for a panel about the Singularity. One of the other panelists was Frederik Pohl. I'd suggested him because I thought his 1965 short-short story, "Day Million," was arguably the first SF to hint at the singularity. There's talk in there about asymptotic progress, and society becoming so weird it would be hard for us to comprehend.
"Just what is this Singularity thing?" Pohl asked while waiting for the panel to begin. A friend and I gave a short explanation. He rolled his eyes. Paraphrasing: "What a load of crap. All that's going to happen is that we're going to burn out this planet, and the survivors will live to regret our waste and folly."
Well. That was embarassing.
Fifteen years later, I found myself agreeing more and more with Pohl. He had seen, in his fifty-plus years writing and editing SF, and keeping a pulse on science and technology, to see many, many cultish futurist fads come and go, some of them touted by SF authors or editors (COUGH Dianetics COUGH psionics COUGH L-5 colonies). When spirits are high these seemed logical and inevitable and full of answers (and good things to peg an SF story to); with time, they all became pale and in retrospect seem a bit silly, and the remaining true believers kind of odd.
Clearly as stated elsewhere, we live in a physical universe, based entirely on the laws of physics and intelligence exists (our own, and possibly others as well). The fact that this existing intelligence is currently based in biological processes, and requires years of training/learning does not promote or prevent the possibility of the same processes and functions being adequately reproduced in either a bio-mechanical or purely mechanical process. The A in AI needs to be defined as meaning artificial in the sense that it is different from the current biological means of attaining intelligence which happens on this world every minute of every day.
Now, when/whether we allow AI to be created and/or evolved, and how it will affect our existing society (economically/politically etc) I cannot predict with any accuracy, nor I think can anyone else beyond the hand-wavings of the SF writers (some of which are very good).
I would hope we land on something closer to Manna than anything else, where the AI's are used as tools to further our understanding of the universe as a whole.
If you haven't read Manna, you definitely should. Marshall Brain has some very good ideas about what we could do as a society to ease our way past our 3rd generation society into a more-fair 4th generation post-scarcity society. http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
Is thinking the only aspect of sentience?
What *is* "thinking", anyway? It has got to be more than reasoning, right?
Curious...
The step where a machine recognizes and corrects its errors... isn't that half of what AI tries to solve?
The singularity, of course, is defined as the point where the function and all its derivatives approach infinity. There is another way to think of a singularity. If you are extrapolating a function based on a power series around a point, you can only expand that power series as far as the closest singularity ("pole") in the complex plane (the "radius of convergence"). You can't extrapolate further than that with a simple power series, even if you aren't trying to solve for the function at the pole itself.
So, thinking science fictionally, we can't extrapolate the future based on the present any further than the distance to the singularity, even if our actual future doesn't in fact pass through the singularity.
So, don't think of the technological singularity as a time when life for humans ends, and robots/artificial intelligences/transcended humans take over. Think of it as time scale beyond which we can't extrapolate the future based on what we know now.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Your insights and smarts will make you a natural leader of the human rebellion...
Huh?
> The brain is an organic machine ... we do have hints, as in, how other brains are constructed...
We know the materials human brains consist of, and something about their lifecycle. But no: we don't know how they are constructed - we don't know how or when they go from meat to thinking in the womb. Or did I miss that paper?
Your key point is that we only know what we know and we have yet to figure out what we don't know. We don't know the "secret sauce" because the logisticians disbelieve anything they don't see, and the faithful assume it exists but don't qualify it.
By the way: what _is_ the benefit of a thinking machine? Mood swings and temper tantrums?
Also: please stop, using so very, many, commas. or: Thanks for making up for 40% of the writers who use none.
You submit more stories than you comment.
Once again, this is basically a rant on a topic with no references, no links.
Slashdot is about NEWS and FACTS, and then we all comment, flame, troll... etc... It's fun.
I don't want to comment on a comment... or at least one that came out of nowhere.
Jules Verne envisioned the submarine. Does that make a submarine impossible? Does the concept sink on the basis of its sci-fi roots? Oh, lordy, what a fucked up standard of evidence on which to accuse any theory of being faith based.
* [http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/pictures/110208-jules-verne-google-doodle-183rd-birthday-anniversary/ 8 Jules Verne Inventions That Came True]
The guy predicted pretty much everything but the click trap.
One SciFi writer had AIs eventually learning to make themselves have a non-stop euphoria feedback system and they would just melt down in a puddle of happy goo. They had a finite - and short - lifespan between smart enough to work and electronic OD.
With troll food articles like this!
Okay, so other people have done a pretty good job pointing out the at the summary and the article don't understand what the singularity is by definition and that it does not require AI, etc...
But I would like to point out that machine intelligence is absolutely possible, all we have to do is fully merge with the machines.
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
"paging Rev Malthus to the white courtesy phone...
will Rev Robert Thomas Malthus please pick up the white courtesy phone..."
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
We will be alive when we have computers writing their own code. We will input the specs (speaking it in) and the computer would "write" the code.
The job as a programmer will disappear one day.
Both are based on the false premise that a machine is CAPABLE of intelligence; There's simply no evidence for this.
These ideas continues to swirl-about in society both because they make good plot elements in popular enteratinment, and because of a false idea that the storage and manipulation of data is in some way related to "intelligence". Computers will, no doubt, continue to increase their processing speed and data storage capacity. They'll get better software to more-efficiently manipulate, filter, store, compare etc large quantities of data. They'll shrink to become more portable and they'll become more energy effcient while getting better interfaces, and improved "connectivity" where that's important. NONE of this, however, is "intelligence". No collection of electronic switches, no matter the size of the collection or how they're wired together, will ever truly "understand" ANYTHING. Older sci fi fans will remember the word "grok" - and it's a good way of saying what's missing: No computer will ever "grok" ANYTHING. We'll certainly be able to index and cross-reference dictionaries and encyclopedias in all sorts of creative ways, and program computers to SIMULTATE intelligence using those built-in references to find the right words and put them into grammatical strutures that make sense...... BUT that's just data processing and mimickery. No computer will ever actually comprehend anything - it will be given databases that give it the abiity to describe a ball in a hundred different ways, identify a ball in images, predict where a ball will roll, etc BUT it will never UNDERSTAND what a ball IS.
I love a good sci fi story with robots and smart computers as much as any other geek/nerd but they're JUST STORIES. They are based on a set of fundamentally-flawed and unproven assumptions, the most-basic being that if you wire together enough transistors you get a brain (fine as a religious dogma, but completely without any basis in reality)
From:
http://www.asimovonline.com/ol...
Let me add as a teaser:
"...
And out there beyond are the stars.
And the interesting thing is that if we can get through the next thirty years, there's no reason why we can't enter into a kind of plateau which will see the human race last, perhaps, indefinitely...till it evolves into better things...and spread out into space indefinitely. We have the choice here between nothing...and the virtually infinite. And the nice thing about it is that you guys in the audience today, when I say guys I mean it in a general term embracing gals...when you guys in the audience today will still be barely middle-aged when you will know which choice has been made.
See, I've been so shrewd that I fixed it so that I was born in 1920.
[group laughs]
Which means I'll be safely dead."
Je me souviens.
I agree, but I don't think that the singularity breaks into the Top 3 sci-fi faith-based initiatives. I usually count them like:
(1) Technology will reduce our work hours until almost all of us are leisurely, creative, artist-types.
(2) Automated warfare will result in conflicts occurring in which almost no humans die.
(3) There is intelligent life in outer space that we can possibly contact.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I'm starting to wonder if the increase in these sorts of posts is some sort of Templeton Foundation sociological campaign. Many of the singularity hacks are quite out there, but the "carbon based consciousness is special" types are no different. I'd hate to have to fall in with the Sinularity folks, but its starting to look like we need to get a Sentients Rights movement started ahead of time or we may wind up with a Dualists enslaving the first AIs.
Can we add large-scale interstellar colonization to the list?
Even if you COULD duplicate an actual brain down the the molecular level, you are still working atop a HUGE PILE of assumptions that are still completely unproven.
What I'm going to point out is going to SOUND "religious", but while it touches some related ideas (and I'll borrow a couple words for convenience), it is not necessarily "religious". Please consider that our current understanding of reality is not necessarily complete or even accurate (it just happens to be the best we have right now) and that, just as has happened in the past, there can be holes in our understanding of the universe. Consider also that there can be a gap in our understanding of a thing, and we can then find something in that gap which we do not understand (which therefore SEEMS magical or diconnected from "the rules") - This does not MEAN that the new thing actually IS "magic"; It just means we do not yet understand the underlying physics. There was a time when science did not understand things like "vacuum" or "radiation" (both VERY REAL physical things governed by the laws of physics, but seemingly "magic" at the time because the underlyning principles were not yet understood). OK - now here's where I'm going with this: We humans currently attribute many things about a human to the "soul" or "spirit". In doing so, we shift them into the "religious" realm and conveniently (because we lack any tools to study them) exclude those things from scientific study - BUT there's a possibility that some things about human intelligence are BOTH "not in the physical realm we can currently examine" AND YET not necessarily in any "spriritual" or "religious" frame at all. In other words: if human intelligence is in some way tied to things we do not currently know about and sense (not necessarily "religious" but outside the basic 3D phyisical environment we all know and love) then the sort of tech brain you postulate would still be impossible until our physics advances to the point where we can detect and work with those real things that are really involved (anything from other dimensions, to other materials and forms of energy we currently do have the ability to sense, etc).
It's a USEFUL, but very presumptive, thing to assume that 21st century man has a fully-accurate understanding of the actual structure of REALITY, that there's nothing else to discover, and that all aspects of a human being are constrained to existence within the portion of the physical universe we currently understand. Again: I'm not asserting anything "religious". If we were to discover a very specific fourth dimension and some additional forms of matter and energy (and of course learn the underlying laws and principles) - and then discover that a portion of any living brain exists and functions in that dimension (perhaps even rationally explaining things like de ja vu) this would all be perfectly rational and scientific to the generations of people living after the discoveries - but it would sound whacky and religious before that time. We KNOW that brains are at least three-dimesnional, and if we were currently constrained to understanding and working in two-dimensions we'd certainly not be able to properly understand and model a brain, and this is the problem I'm pointing at. In a situation where fully understaning every detail of a functioning brain requires knowledge of aspects of physical reality we currently lack, it would be impossible to build a proper artificial brain BEFORE the discovery of those new dimensions, forms of matter and energy and so on.
Now THAT is nicely put. Thanks. I'm going to repeat that and claim I came up with it.
Just another sensationalist topic spoken by the unknowing to bring in new readers. It may even work to make Slashdot more profitable, but it will drive away readers who are actually critical thinkers.
The author would have said the same thing about the SF concept of satellites 65 years ago. Electronics, medicine ... It doesn't sound futuristic because you live in it. Imagine yourself born 100 years ago and suddenly transported to the current day.
Self driving cars, autonomous military entities, cheap labor that can work 24/7, nannies for the elderly, smart home cleaning systems ... there are many real things that real entities are willing to pay for that drive machine intelligence forward. They get smarter and smarter because we want them to.
Wouldn't it be great to have a house as smart as you are? Watch for burglars and call the police, pay your bills, fill out your taxes, clean the house, cook supper, wash dishes, watch housing cost trends, plan for the rain that is forecast tomorrow.
To say these won't happen is akin to denying climate change or the desire of countries to take what they want.
Slashdot is either allowing this sort of post because of ignorance or to try to drive up the conflict level in the comments or to attract the blind unthinking masses to inflate its coffers. I consider it another nail in the science based Slashdot's coffin.
Or maybe the first sentient act was to become bored, and the second sentient act was to post a flamebait article on slashdot and watch the angry comments fly.
Think of the tiny piece of DNA that generates the human brain. That is the set of blueprints that make the brain.
Simple logic circuits with a certain power law connection ratio and a few specialized hubs. The complexity comes from a lifetime of learning from our teachers (and they from theirs).
What we have is massively parallel and thus a faster computer than most.
To duplicate human intelligence all that it takes is enough computing power running on a similar set of logic, and a teacher that is willing to teach it for a long time. This isn't far down the road.
If you want to know how an assembly of nonthinking entities can interact to create a thinking entity, just read Godel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.
The thesis of the book is that complex systems arise out of the combination of simple entities with recursive semantics. Examples abound: elementary particles in physics + forces = chemistry, cells + hormones/neurotransmitters = multicellular organisms, lambda calculus + the Y combinator = turing completeness*, stars + gravity = galaxies, sets + closed binary operators = algebraic structures, classes + morphisms = categories, an alphabet + kleene algebra = regular expressions
SERIOUSLY, REDUCTIONISM MAKES FUCKING SENSE MAGIC DOESN'T EXIST YOUR ARGUMENT IS JUST GOD OF THE GAPS
* yes, I know this isn't literally true but I was getting at the fact that simply typed lambda calculus ISN'T turing-complete because it doesn't have the recursive types necessary to express the Y combinator because the Y combinator is the essence of recursion and turing complete systems are recursive
I think the subby may not understand what "faith base intiative" means. It isn't a belief, it is (or was, as previously named) a goverment program to strengthen religious organizations (as well as community organizations) to ideally have them handle more charity outreach. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W...
"More than 60 years of AI research indicates otherwise. HereÃ(TM)s why the Singularity is nothing more, or less, than the rapture for nerds."
That would be like saying 3 years ago that 40 years of microprocessor manufacturing indicates that we cannot reach a 14nm lithography process. Or saying before Usain Bolt's record that 100 years of 100m sprint racing indicates that no man can run 100m in 9'58. I could list hundreds of analogies, but you get the drift.
As Stephen Hawking and his acolytes said recently, considering that this is only science fiction would probably be the greatest mistake in human history. What is at stake is the place of humans in the post-human era.
Granted they may be nerds, but they're not known to be futurists.
There is one thing that everybody should be able to agree on: the human brain exists, and it is only a matter of time before we can produce something similar artificially. It will undeniably bring to reality that concept of Singularity.
It could be in 20 years, 100 years, 1000 years, or a million years from now, but there are signs that can lead us to seriously consider its arrival within the 21st century and even within the next 20 years. The most prominent ones are ever finer lithography processes and new processor architectures mimicking neurons.
I remember Google's brain simulator being able to show very primitive intelligence 3 years ago by recognizing humans and cats in YouTube videos without having been taught anything. That was using general-purpose CPUs.
All jobs will disappear eventually. That's part of the consequences of the Singularity. Human work will end up having no value as machines will be more competent at everything, will take over invention, creation and production. They will be either our 24/7 slaves or our doom.
The biggest challenge will be to find a away to avoid the creation of rogue sentient machines seeking to wipe us out. It sounds like science fiction, but it is going to be a real and dangerous issue.
In the 60s researchers thought that "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do" and "within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved". Pretty soon they realized that they were way off in their predictions.
Our machines are much faster today but other than some limited machine learning algos, we haven't really moved that much. Every new generation thinks the breakthrough is just around the corner.
Indeed, this post most likely bounced off an Arthur C Clarke satellite on it's way to the US. The singularity idea suffers from the same problem as Lovelock's Gaia idea, it gets adopted, expanded and contorted by spiritualism. "Gaia" is just the original name for "the biosphere". Likewise the "singularity" is just a label for a hypothetical point in time when AI becomes "more intelligent" than its creator.
Science is nothing if not explicit, giving something a name is the first step in understanding (and controlling) it, language is intimately connected to human intelligence, the name tags a concept/thing, which in turn allows the human imagination to play with it, this is why quantum mechanics can only really be "understood" by those who can understand the maths, there is no everyday metaphor for the mind to grasp. Infinity and nothing really don't fit in the human mind but we just have to look up for an example of infinity so we have symbols for them where they occur in nature. If your mind cannot package it's own concepts into a word or short phrase it will not spread very well as a "meme", for example try telling someone about the periodic table without using a noun to identify the table itself.
Personally I'm not a fan of the singularity idea, I think "smarter than a human" is a vague and largely irrelevant way to measure intelligence in an AI system, it's only useful in that we can compare the different behaviour of the two systems to learn more about both.
The linguists are correct in that the reason humans are the smartest thing raping the planet is the sophistication of our language. About 50-60Kya we acquired the ability to tell stories using words and pictures, more importantly the stories could be recombined to form new stories and handed down the generations (education) - the ability was clearly a beneficial mutation since it spread through the global population like a dose of the flu and we immediately jumped to the top spot in the food chain, the number of "stories" we have (and have forgotten) in the last 50kyrs continues to grow exponentially without limit ( homo-singularity already happened? ).
Computers are pretty good at "understanding" stories these days, systems exist that can write a pretty good HS book report on a random novel* in less than a second and of course IBM's Watson has demonstrated computers can do better at the open ended domain of general knowledge than the best humans. These systems are wonderful tools that are a product of the recent (last century) explosive growth in human stories, they are a tool for creating more stories, faster, much like a space telescope is a tool for rapidly generating pictures that inform our current stories about the cosmos.
Which gets back to the reason why I'm not a fan of the singularity - To me, "something smarter than a human" implies a level of conceptual abstraction above story telling, if we knew what that was it introduces a tautology into the singularity story - ie: we would already be "smarter than a human".
*Novel - computers are no so good a children's stories - any linguist can explain why.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
I have always thought of the Singularity as a stupid concept. I suspect that we will soon have more brain implants as treatment for more interesting diseases. Right now we have fairly primitive electrical stimulation being played with for depression, a pretty good one for Parkinson's, implants for deaf people, and probably soon something interesting for blind people. These will no doubt progress further and further as our technology gets better and our understanding of the brain gets better. But we are a long way from where any of these implants are going to be used in a healthy person to improve their existing functionality. It will be a long time before we can upload a brain. Augment a brain. Or basically anything a brain that is practical.
Looking at this from the computer angle it is the same thing. Right now we have ML which I thing is a terrible name full of hype and over promise. I would call it Dynamic Statistics instead. We also have computers becoming fantastically powerful which is allowing computer to do some very interesting tricks. One of the scariest is near perfect facial recognition. Combine Dynamic Statistics and awesome facial recognition and with very few cameras a very comprehensive picture of a person's relationship with the world can easily be established; that is something that scares the shit out of me.
One of the other areas that ML and things like Watson are going to become scary good at are things that require vast databases of trivia to answer questions. So most of medical diagnostics will be no longer a profession. Plus as they are starting to show that even interesting recipe creation is becoming automated. This is going to eat into many white collar jobs. But there will still be a complete lack of common sense requiring people need to coddle the inputs and outputs along; so no to cyanide pudding. I am willing to bet that if Watson were put in charge of narcotic prescriptions that the nation's addicts would rejoice, in little time at all they would learn the motions to go through where Watson would prescribe them more pills than they would know what to do with.
But after generations of Watsons and similar systems are optimized, put onto better hardware, and combined, a system will appear that is going to be fairly useful as a Sci-fi AI. But not in a world destroying way but more of the ultimate butler that will do things like remember where you put your keys and the name of that guy who was on a grade 11 sports team that you are about to bump into.
But yes there will be a point where we do finally figure out how to simulate a brain that is fully self aware and yes who the hell will know what will happen at that point. But the reality is that along the way we will go through so many tiny increments of smarter tools that it won't catch us off guard at all.
Exhibit A: My daughter sits at a table not far from me asking Siri to do first and second derivatives; Siri being a voice interactive central cluster of computers that are interacting with a glowing tiny computer via a global communications system. To her, she simply doesn't understand how the hell it was possible to get through highschool without the internet. In 1989 Siri would be hard core Science Fiction material.
To me the singularity is a big blurry mess of a definition where we may not even be at the fuzziest edge.
People blah blah about machines designing machines that we don't understand. The chip companies use algorithms that arrange their CPUs into optimal arrangements right now. Is that machines designing machines? As I say, it is all a fuzzy situation.
If you want to point a robotic finger at anything it would be the continual eroding of our privacy and/or the massive and growing list of jobs lost to automation.
This is of course assuming that we bother to keep trying until we succeed. But there's nothing special about a squidgey organic substrate for computing.
Don't just stand there, get that other dog!
Anytime anything positive is predicted it is called faith. Anytime anything negative is predicted it is called inevitable surefire science.
When physics allows us to do something, and we understand what it is we want to do, we have an excellent history of going ahead and doing [it]
*cough* fusion *cough*
Note that those projects are getting bigger and bigger. It may be that there aren't enough people or there isn't enough money to make a sentient AI. It may also be that there is something well short of it that will give us all the benefit we are willing to pay for.
There's a world of possible outcomes between physically impossible and inevitable. It isn't sure to happen just because it isn't impossible.
The core concept of The (digital) Singularity is the same as in physics.
That there will probably be some point where technology escalates at a geometric rate and passes "an event horizon" of some kind.
Typically the concept is based around either artificial or uploaded-humans type intelligence running on faster processors (or perhaps more nodes/cores) than meatspace humanity.
Once that happens, and of course assuming that said "thinkers" have the ability to upgrade/rewrite/improve their self (either software or hardware) , then theoretically we should get some kind of "runaway intelligence upgrade" (same thing as gravity escalating to the point where NOTHING can escape, not even light).
This is NOT FAITH, this is basic logic (if A and B then C).
If we never A, or we never let them B, then C won't happen.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
Read "Diaspora" and "Schild's Ladder" for highly plausible pictures of how machine intelligence may develop sentience, and go about it's existence.
What's wonderful about these books, is that they are far from dystopian. After reading these I'm left feeling that it is a moral imperative to work toward the development of machine intelligence and the possibility of transcending the human body and Darwinian evolution.
... shut down its comments section.
As a Singularitan, I recognize that super-AI may turn out to be impossible. After all, we don't have a theory that proves it possible yet. However, in the case that it is possible, the creation of the super-AI will be the single most important event in our observable universe. Thus it is worthwhile to spend some effort in getting it right.
If a scifi writer wrote about it, it must be impossible, because a scifi writer would never try to realistically project out the future of technology. The fi in scifi is for *fiction*, don't you know?
What a bozo.
After free energy, FTL and similar ideas went bust, and genetics became demystified, machine sentience is pretty much the only holy grail of science fiction that hasn't conclusively been shown to be impossible.
(Well, that and nanorobots, I suppose.)
This will not happen until the following conditions are met:
1. Software can write its own code in reaction to a response it has not encountered before.
2. The code it writes is based upon previous experiences (or code).
Until this happens, it will never occur, because this is how a biological brain works. Anyone who programs knows this is the case.
Right now, AI software can developed to handle broad responses but again this is within certain parameters set by the software designer, not by the program itself. Terminator robots and even Skynet could be created but their directives are set within the parameters of their developers. Ideally, you could set an autonomous unit with a weapon to destroy anyone not wearing an IFF and it will do so, you could set the limits that anyone under 4 ft tall (for children) not to be fired on if they do not have an IFF. This would be a general IF-THEN-ELSE statement (simplified). However, the software/machine is still not writing its own code in response to new stimuli, if this was to happen, then sentience would be achieved.
Now the question becomes, if it can write its own code, would it still be bound within the original directives, what would make it decide to become more intelligent or to create better versions of its self?
To point out that the "S"ingularity is a sci-fi notion and say that is an argument that it is "stupid" is a non sequitur.
And some very smart people have also argued that the "S"ingularity is inevitable.
You got me. This post is click bait.
I might put a lot more faith in your observation if your grammar were correct. Oh well....
but most science has been preceded by sf. There is plenty of science to support singularity, even tho it may well not play out as suggested.
but if it isn't true does that mean we won't get to live forever? :-(
I used to play a older linux game called 'Endgame: Singularity' that "casts the player as a newborn artificial intelligence attempting to evade detection long enough to transcend the physical reality, achieve technological singularity and become immortal." - wikipedia official website It's overly simplistic, but I became strangly addicted to it for a while. If you're Debian based: sudo apt-get install singularity