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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."
"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.
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.
>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?
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.
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.
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
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.
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.