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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."
Hey! I want my transporters, warp drives, and a galaxy full of humans-with-extra-bumps-embodying-a-particular-stereotype, and I want these things NOW!
"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.
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.
The disparaging way that the summary and article talk about references to science fiction stories is practically an ad hominem attack. There is nothing inherently wrong with science fiction stories that makes them improper for thinking about the implications of changing technology. Much of the best sci-fi in existence is little less than thought experiments about how various kinds of advances might affect humanity on an individual and cultural level.
... 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.
There's a big difference between "Hmm, what would happen if nuclear power cells existed and we could build a computer the size of a planet!?!" and "This is the specific scientific path that will lead us to that future."
Literature of any form can enlighten, provoke, and illuminate. But confusing "What if?" with "This is the way it will happen!" prophecy is fucking stupid.
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
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.
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.
Hey! I want my transporters, warp drives, and a galaxy full of humans-with-extra-bumps-embodying-a-particular-stereotype, and I want these things NOW!
I would trade all of that for one Orion slave girl.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
I'd agree with that, except for L. Ron Hubbard who showed us all that sci fi can be dangerous.
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
Slashdot publishes flamebait articles with some regularity, it just feels worse today because we've had two consecutively.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Your insights and smarts will make you a natural leader of the human rebellion...
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.
There are more than a few people like that here.
But Verner Vinge isn't one of them. In his original paper, he used them to illustrate how difficult to comprehend concepts might, conceivable play out. For example, he mentions that a singularity may play out over the course of decades or over the course of hours. Imagining how such massive changes could occur on a global scale in just a few hours is difficult, so he points the reader to a book whose author has already put time and effort into imagining how such a thing could play out and what some of the implications might be. It is using the book precisely as a thought experiment to examine an especially extreme part of what he is describing.
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.
If slavery is the only way you can get women, maybe you should spend less time watching ST and more time working on your person skills?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
In order to simulate a human brain at the atomic level, first we would have to know exactly which chemicals are in a real brain, and we don't even know that much yet.
Trying to model a human brain in a computer in order to build an AI is like trying to build a mechanical horse in order to get around faster. While it isn't impossible, it's neither practical nor necessary. You can make a machine that bears no resemblance whatsoever to the original biological version, and it will still accomplish the same task.
However, if you COULD find a way to exactly duplicate the entirety of an existing human brain, down to the atomic level, then that model should behave exactly as the original person would (to the point where the simulation actually thinks it IS that person) and you would have found the secret to immortality (or something very close to it).
With troll food articles like this!
Hey! I want my transporters, warp drives, and a galaxy full of humans-with-extra-bumps-embodying-a-particular-stereotype, and I want these things NOW!
Why does everyone always forget the deflector dish tech? It's probably the most powerful bit of tech in the newer ST series. Reversing the polarity or rerouting something through the deflector array can do damn near anything short of creating life.
I don't know, it worked for these fuckers, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. There are plenty of people that took their story as the way it's gonna go down. Is it any different? Let's ask Kirk Cameron.
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
However you may want some backup from science if you make real world predictions (and prevent real world solutions because people are pre-occupied by la-la-land.)
thegodmovie.com - watch it
The anonymous coward has a good point.
Highly paid jobs (like actuarial and x-ray analysis) are much more cost effective jobs for automation and more likely to be replaced.
I think creativity will be the last thing to fall.
Manual dexterity (including random bits out of bins and assembling things from them) is already done faster (and already cheaper in some cases) by machines.
The vision and manual manipulation problem is mostly beat.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
The irony being that the "slave girls" were secretly in charge of their society the entire time.
TNG Episode "Emergence" would like to have a word with you.
It's been a long time since I've watched any STTNG episodes. Was it the deflector that created that consciousness? I though it was from all of the data stored in the computer or something.
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
This is not a hard problem to solve. You just put a brain in a blender and send the resulting goo through a mass spectrometer.
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/manna...
Singularitarians may be nutty, but believing in a 'post-scarcity society' is worse. Threre will never be more resources than humans can use, unless you discover a way to magic stuff out of nothing, forever.
Current state if the art is that writing the "specs" is about as hard or harder than writing the code. And that has been the state for the last 50 years. This is unlikely to change anytime soon and may not ever change.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
That and there was the episode "Ship in a bottle" where Geordi instructed the holodeck computer to create a Moriarty character capable of defeating Data (not Sherlock Holmes). The program then gave Moriarty sentience.
You're messin' with my Zen Thing, man.....
If machines are incapable of true intelligence, then so are we, because we are machines.
Do I think that any of the AI research currently going on even begins to come close to the ridiculous complexity of a human brain? No. I think they're useful approximations in terms of getting stuff done, but nothing we're doing now will produce anything that's actually "intelligent", as opposed to merely acting like it. But it's clearly *possible* to create a brain, because brains exist.
Actually, PC speeds never increased at an exponential rate, and currently we are even sub-linear. What did increase exponentially for a while is the number of transistors in there. The speed up you get is vastly less than linear in the number of transistors and the limiting factor has been interconnect for almost 2 decades now. And that cannot scale exponentially and never did.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Atomic level is not precise enough. There are a lot of quantum effects in synapses.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Can we add large-scale interstellar colonization to the list?
You are quite correct. The problem is these people assume that physical reality as known today is complete. That would indicate that humans are mere physical machines. However there is absolutely no indication that physics knows it all and a few rather striking ones that it does not. Examples: Still no GUT, AI research has not even a theory how intelligence could be produced, etc. In the end, the whole argumentation is circular, like so often with the religious mind-set.
But: It is not completely impossible that AI will eventually be possible. However when we look at the only example of intelligence we have, it is possible that said AI will come with consciousness, free-will and and maybe even emotions. There is absolutely no indication these things can be separated and in the only thing that exhibits intelligence, they are not. That is another thing conveniently overlooked by those that confuse their religious beliefs with science.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Just like Earth.
If you haven't read Manna, you definitely should.
Why does everyone think Manna is some mind-blowingly insighftul piece of near-prophecy? It's really not. It's a fairly superficial and trite dystopian/utopian juxtaposition. And the characters and dialogue are laughable.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
Yeah, but it does not really work as a transporter, thus if you wish to get from A to B it is not that impressive.
The 'disparaging way', I think, signals a new low in slashdot posting. Slashdot was never all that professional, but it kept an appropriate minimal standard. This just reads like someone's blog rant that somehow got a bigger audience.
Death by Snu-Snu!
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
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...
Yeah, but it does not really work as a transporter, thus if you wish to get from A to B it is not that impressive.
Sure it does. You invert something or another and it can be used for faster than light propulsion. If done correctly you will arrive at your destination before you left your starting point.
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.
According to Wikipedia, "Proponents of the singularity typically postulate an "intelligence explosion",[5][6] where superintelligences design successive generations of increasingly powerful minds, that might occur very quickly and might not stop until the agent's cognitive abilities greatly surpass that of any human."
"could", "might", and "might". There are a lot of presuppositions to singularity theory. By the same logic I can claim that all of the oxygen molecules are one day going to randomly congregate in the corner of someone's room just long enough for that person to suffocate. With all of the people on the planet after a certain number of years it is destined to happen, right? I'd be just as likely to one day travel to the far edges of the galaxy on a ship powered by an improbability drive just to discover that the meaning of the universe is 42.
One has to accept the Law of Accelerating Returns, feasibility of AGI (strong AI), feasibility of superintelligence, and the premise of intelligence explosion. The summary author is correct in stating that belief in the Singularity is stupid, just as it is stupid to believe that if we just cut loose the restraints on Capitalism everyone would be overwhelmed by economic abundance, or that if we just had a government agency to distribute material needs to the masses we could all be satisfied and work two four-hour days a week. Yes, in theory it is "possible", but if you are convinced that it is inevitable and it will happen in your lifetime, you are as delusional as any religious fanatic waiting for a scriptural prophecy to be fulfilled. Generally speaking, if it looks like a cult and smells like cult then its a cult - complete with SF scriptures, a supreme being, and a chance at an afterlife.
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!
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.
Marx was an idiot.
But he did establish the ethic that any action is moral if it is in pursuit of revolution. Ie., "the ends justify the means." Which is the single most evil proposition ever devised.
It is utilized in subtle form by today's leftists when they use a term which means something entirely different, in a manner such as what you just did with "capitalism."
Capitalism by definition is simply the private ownership of the means of production.
Unless force is used to prevent someone from producing that which is scarce at a cheaper price, capitalism will do exactly the opposite of what you propose. Which means that you are either an indoctrinated tool, or engaging in deliberate intellectual dishonesty.
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.
Interesting point.
Along those lines- I asked for my usual Diet Coke with a little bit of rootbeer and was told at the drive thru that they couldn't serve mixed drinks any more. I assumed it was some kind of health rule but when I went in, I saw the new machine and realized that it precluded anything but a pure cup of one type of soda.
The "creative" factor of the soda's was erased in exchange for $1 sodas (vs $1.79 at whataburger). For now at least, I just went inside and got my own drink.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
We will be alive when we have computers writing their own code.
We've had LISP for a long time now.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
That's ridiculous. http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~se...
Processor speeds have, and continue to, increase exponentially.
Film at 11.
...But is the film as good as the book?
That is pseudo-mystical nonsense. Entropy is a _measure_ of a configuration or state, not an effect by itself. Saying there is entropy is like saying there is numbers. That holds for both definitions of entropy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Apt analogy.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
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