If you people would RTFB, you'd discover that the Singularity has a history of intellectual discussion going back around two decades. The treatments in science fiction are a part of that, but just reading the SF isn't going to get you much (any more than reading SF will teach you physics, or math, though it might serve to get you interested).
The first person to use the term "Singularity" as applied to futurism was John von Neumann, and he used it to mean a disruptive change in the future brought about by a high level of technology.
The first person to postulate that recursive self-improvement in Artificial Intelligence would rapidly produce "ultraintelligent machines" was the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good. Today this is known as the "hard takeoff" scenario.
The first person to popularize the term "Singularity", referring to the breakdown in our model of the future which occurs subsequent to the (technological) creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, was the mathematician (and sometime SF author, and inventor of cyberspace) Vernor Vinge.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" belongs to the accelerating change crowd that includes John Smart. Their thesis is, first, that history shows a trend for major transitions to happen in shorter and shorter times, and second, that you can graph this on log charts, get reasonably straight lines, and extend the lines to produce useful quantitative predictions. I agree with the qualitative thesis but not the quantitative thesis.
In my opinion, Kurzweil could greatly strengthen many of his arguments by giving up on the attempt to predict when these things will occur, and just saying: "They will happen eventually." I think that it is just as important, and a great deal more probable, to say: "Eventually we will be able to create Artificial Intelligence surpassing human intelligence, and then XYZ will happen, so we better get ABC done first." Than to say: "And this will all happen on October 15th, 2022, between 7 and 7:30 in the morning."
Since I don't care particularly about when someone builds a smarter-than-human intelligence, just what happens after that, and what we need to get done before; and since I don't think that this necessarily needs to make life incomprehensible, so long as we do things right; I belong to the I.J. Good "hard takeoff" crowd. With a strong helping of Vernor Vinge, because I think there's a difference in kind associated with a future that contains mind smarter than human, which we do not get just from talking about flying cars, or space travel, or even nanotechnology.
On Slashdot, someone says "intelligence" and you think of all the computer CEOs with IQs of 120 and the starving professors with IQs of 160, and you think that means intelligence isn't important. But you will not find many excellent CEOs, nor professors, nor soldiers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor rationalists, nor scientists, who are chimpanzees. Intelligence is the foundation of human power, the strength that fuels our other arts. Respect it. When someone talks about enhancing human intelligence or building smarter-than-human AI, pay attention. That is what matters to the future, not political yammering, not our little nation-tribes. In 200 million years nobody's going to give a damn who flew the first flying car or
Link goes to an excruciatingly gentle introduction to what this whole Bayesian thing is about, and why your friends seem to think it's so important... but I'll go ahead and spoil the ending, and say that Bayes' Theorem is, in a sense, the underlying equation of science itself; it tells you what constitutes "rational evidence" and exactly how much evidence it is, in which direction.
F=MA is a beautiful equation, don't get me wrong - but can it compare to the equation that describes how scientific theories are confirmed or falsified?
The greatest and the luckiest of mortals? No one will ever be better? That would be sad. Whenever I hear people praise Newton for making so many basic discoveries and contributing so much to the progress of humankind, one thought enters my mind:
Another day, another junk patent; another chatbot, another publicity stunt. The work is uninteresting, the patent is gibberish, and the claim that it tells someone with knowledge of AI how to make the invention is absurd.
If you want to read actual, coherent, existing theoretical work on AI ethics, which has long since left Asimov Laws in the dust, try Googling on "artificial moral agent" or "Friendly AI".
Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.
Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.
Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...
Slashdot Mirror
If you people would RTFB, you'd discover that the Singularity has a history of intellectual discussion going back around two decades. The treatments in science fiction are a part of that, but just reading the SF isn't going to get you much (any more than reading SF will teach you physics, or math, though it might serve to get you interested).
http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-s ing.html
http://singinst.org/what-singularity.html
http://www.accelerationwatch.com/
And let's not forget:
http://justfuckinggoogleit.com/search.pl?query=Sin gularity
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singula rity
The first person to use the term "Singularity" as applied to futurism was John von Neumann, and he used it to mean a disruptive change in the future brought about by a high level of technology.
The first person to postulate that recursive self-improvement in Artificial Intelligence would rapidly produce "ultraintelligent machines" was the Bayesian statistician I. J. Good. Today this is known as the "hard takeoff" scenario.
The first person to popularize the term "Singularity", referring to the breakdown in our model of the future which occurs subsequent to the (technological) creation of smarter-than-human intelligence, was the mathematician (and sometime SF author, and inventor of cyberspace) Vernor Vinge.
Kurzweil's "Singularity" belongs to the accelerating change crowd that includes John Smart. Their thesis is, first, that history shows a trend for major transitions to happen in shorter and shorter times, and second, that you can graph this on log charts, get reasonably straight lines, and extend the lines to produce useful quantitative predictions. I agree with the qualitative thesis but not the quantitative thesis.
In my opinion, Kurzweil could greatly strengthen many of his arguments by giving up on the attempt to predict when these things will occur, and just saying: "They will happen eventually." I think that it is just as important, and a great deal more probable, to say: "Eventually we will be able to create Artificial Intelligence surpassing human intelligence, and then XYZ will happen, so we better get ABC done first." Than to say: "And this will all happen on October 15th, 2022, between 7 and 7:30 in the morning."
Since I don't care particularly about when someone builds a smarter-than-human intelligence, just what happens after that, and what we need to get done before; and since I don't think that this necessarily needs to make life incomprehensible, so long as we do things right; I belong to the I.J. Good "hard takeoff" crowd. With a strong helping of Vernor Vinge, because I think there's a difference in kind associated with a future that contains mind smarter than human, which we do not get just from talking about flying cars, or space travel, or even nanotechnology.
On Slashdot, someone says "intelligence" and you think of all the computer CEOs with IQs of 120 and the starving professors with IQs of 160, and you think that means intelligence isn't important. But you will not find many excellent CEOs, nor professors, nor soldiers, nor artists, nor musicians, nor rationalists, nor scientists, who are chimpanzees. Intelligence is the foundation of human power, the strength that fuels our other arts. Respect it. When someone talks about enhancing human intelligence or building smarter-than-human AI, pay attention. That is what matters to the future, not political yammering, not our little nation-tribes. In 200 million years nobody's going to give a damn who flew the first flying car or
I believe you mean E^2=m^2c^4 + p^2c^2.
Two words: Bayes' Theorem.
Link goes to an excruciatingly gentle introduction to what this whole Bayesian thing is about, and why your friends seem to think it's so important... but I'll go ahead and spoil the ending, and say that Bayes' Theorem is, in a sense, the underlying equation of science itself; it tells you what constitutes "rational evidence" and exactly how much evidence it is, in which direction.
F=MA is a beautiful equation, don't get me wrong - but can it compare to the equation that describes how scientific theories are confirmed or falsified?
The greatest and the luckiest of mortals? No one will ever be better? That would be sad. Whenever I hear people praise Newton for making so many basic discoveries and contributing so much to the progress of humankind, one thought enters my mind:
"I can do better than that."
If you want to read actual, coherent, existing theoretical work on AI ethics, which has long since left Asimov Laws in the dust, try Googling on "artificial moral agent" or "Friendly AI".
Starter links:
Prolegomena to Any Future Artificial Moral Agent
Creating Friendly AI
Incidentally, these are both obvious prior art.
Homo sapiens sapiens won't last forever. The only question is whether we wipe out all intelligence in the Solar System due to superweapons, an outcome which we can legitimately label as "bad", or whether "life as we know it" is ended by the rise of greater-than-human intelligence first. Frankly, I think I'll take what's behind door number two.
Bill Joy scores points for pointing out the probability of apocalypse, but vastly more important is accepting the certainty of some apocalypse and deciding which one we want. I don't think there's much of a contest between the coinflip chance that AIs are nice to humans and the near-certainty of being murdered by Iraqi nanoweaponry.
Anyway, the Extropians list has been rehashing this issue for years - right down to the argument about how to build an AI - and, unsurprisingly, some Web resources seem to have sprung up along the way. So if you'd rather not reinvent the wheel...
Ope n Directory Singularity category
Singularity Sub-Page in Anders Transhuman Page
Comments on Vinge's Singularity (13 authors write essays; Vinge responds)
Staring into the Singularity
The Plan to Singularity (403K)
For those of you wondering about how to build the AI:
Coding a Transhuman AI (353K)
For those of you wondering about what the AIs will do:
Logic from Frequently Asked Questions about the Meaning of Life