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Let's discuss this "technological singularity" business

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Lost Fragment

Obsessed with 4chan
Can we have a reality and evidenced based discussion on this and keep the conspiracy theory/metaphysics/supernatural stuff to a minimum? I'm looking at you, Meus Renaissance and Wii.

So yeah, this isn't exactly a new subject to me, but I've never seriously studied it. Most of my reading about it has been casual. Like I'll stumble on an article about it and think "ooh, that's an interesting thought" while at the same time thinking it's not very likely. Like how articles on theoretical ways to travel to another galaxy in the future are interesting, but considering the laws of physics, don't seem very likely to my layman mind, no matter how advanced a civilization is.

Then I stumbled on this article yesterday. Before now, I've pigeonholed the people who believe the singularity is inevitable into the "this dude is also convinced that aliens visit Earth even though there's no evidence and that the Illuminati put hidden cameras in his teabags" or "this guy is a reputable scholar, but this is just a highly theoretical thought experiemnt" groups, but this Kurzweil person has a great track record, a ridiculous resume, and seems 100% convinced that the singularity is coming pretty soon.

Not only that, but the shit he talks about is pretty far out compared to what I've read before. Immortality through being able to back up our consciousnesses to computers? Resurrecting the dead? Having our nanobots spread to all corners the cosmos, creating a "conscious" universe? WAT?

This all sounds pretty cool, but because it's a pretty huge unknown, the possibility of living in a reality like that alone is pretty spooky, without even considering the possibility that the machines could go all Skynet on us.

Now, even reputable folks with great track records who've received accolades and awards from the White House are susceptible to just being fucking crazy, which is a distinct possibility with Mr. Ray Kurzweil and the other scholars and academics who take the technological singularity seriously. But I dunno. There are some pretty smart folks on GAF, and at least one person that I know of who has hardcore credentials and works with Cern on the LHC, so I ask you folks: just how realistic is this singularity stuff?
 
well kurzweil is kind of a genius but bear in mind that most of his predictions on when things will happen are based on this are really based on extrapolation of past events and rates of technological change. i wouldn't really be surprised if many of his predictions come true, just not on the same timeline that he predicts them.
 
You should start by defining what the hell you mean by a technological singularity. You're halfway into a conversation and we haven't even started it. What are you even asking?
 
You're asking for the impossible with a question like that considering a few board members lurking around. Only reason you hear this singularity business come up is because it's no secret in the land of nuts the various factions of cabals want to seal up the 2012 and finalize their nwo plans. There are no known illuminati they are completely underground and have been for quite sometime.

As for singularity yes inevitable does it mean we're likely to see it anytime soon not by any means unless you want to get specific.
 
PantherLotus said:
You should start by defining what the hell you mean by a technological singularity. You're halfway into a conversation and we haven't even started it. What are you even asking?
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i also think that a major requirement for truly combining man and machine consciousness is an understanding of the physiology behind human consciousness, and the biologic fields lag pretty well behind the computer engineering end.
 
Kurzweil... lacks on the specifics.

Don't get me wrong... I like his work and his relentless optimism mixed with a pragmatic and smart attitude about all this...

The guy takes 200+ drugs/tablets a day apparently (to help keep him just behind the aging technology curve)... and when asked whether or not if he know's it'll work; he says - he doesn't... but at the cutting edge of science/experiement, someone has to test the stuff.

Personally... I'm more interested in understanding exactly what the technology singularity will mean for us. What are the exact consequences of it? And how will we best benefit? Does it automatically solve all our problems for us?

Isn't there a hard limit on the advancement of computing power (which is what will drive this singularity) as we reach the physical limits of the material universe? I mean, how much smaller can the stuff get?
 
Lost Fragment said:
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F singularity they will easily be the dominant player for the next 7 years probably next two decades. Don't need science to know the ruthless player often wins at the game of business.
 
The first thing everybody should know before even attempting to discuss the Singularity, is what people mean by the word. I'll let Eliezer Yudkowsky explain:

http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singularity-schools/

Eliezer Yudkowsky said:
I’ve noticed that Singularity discussions seem to be splitting up into three major schools of thought: Accelerating Change, the Event Horizon, and the Intelligence Explosion.


* Accelerating Change:
o Core claim: Our intuitions about change are linear; we expect roughly as much change as has occurred in the past over our own lifetimes. But technological change feeds on itself, and therefore accelerates. Change today is faster than it was 500 years ago, which in turn is faster than it was 5000 years ago. Our recent past is not a reliable guide to how much change we should expect in the future.
o Strong claim: Technological change follows smooth curves, typically exponential. Therefore we can predict with fair precision when new technologies will arrive, and when they will cross key thresholds, like the creation of Artificial Intelligence.
o Advocates: Ray Kurzweil, Alvin Toffler(?), John Smart

* Event Horizon:
o Core claim: For the last hundred thousand years, humans have been the smartest intelligences on the planet. All our social and technological progress was produced by human brains. Shortly, technology will advance to the point of improving on human intelligence (brain-computer interfaces, Artificial Intelligence). This will create a future that is weirder by far than most science fiction, a difference-in-kind that goes beyond amazing shiny gadgets.
o Strong claim: To know what a superhuman intelligence would do, you would have to be at least that smart yourself. To know where Deep Blue would play in a chess game, you must play at Deep Blue’s level. Thus the future after the creation of smarter-than-human intelligence is absolutely unpredictable.
o Advocates: Vernor Vinge

* Intelligence Explosion:
o Core claim: Intelligence has always been the source of technology. If technology can significantly improve on human intelligence - create minds smarter than the smartest existing humans - then this closes the loop and creates a positive feedback cycle. What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they’d design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces. Intelligence enhancement is a classic tipping point; the smarter you get, the more intelligence you can apply to making yourself even smarter.
o Strong claim: This positive feedback cycle goes FOOM, like a chain of nuclear fissions gone critical - each intelligence improvement triggering an average of >1.000 further improvements of similar magnitude - though not necessarily on a smooth exponential pathway. Technological progress drops into the characteristic timescale of transistors (or super-transistors) rather than human neurons. The ascent rapidly surges upward and creates superintelligence (minds orders of magnitude more powerful than human) before it hits physical limits.
o Advocates: I. J. Good, Eliezer Yudkowsky


The thing about these three logically distinct schools of Singularity thought is that, while all three core claims support each other, all three strong claims tend to contradict each other.

If you extrapolate our existing version of Moore’s Law past the point of smarter-than-human AI to make predictions about 2099, then you are contradicting both the strong version of the Event Horizon (which says you can’t make predictions because you’re trying to outguess a transhuman mind) and the strong version of the Intelligence Explosion (because progress will run faster once smarter-than-human minds and nanotechnology drop it into the speed phase of transistors).

I find it very annoying, therefore, when these three schools of thought are mashed up into Singularity paste. Clear thinking requires making distinctions.


But what is still more annoying is when someone reads a blog post about a newspaper article about the Singularity, comes away with none of the three interesting theses, and spontaneously reinvents the dreaded fourth meaning of the Singularity:

* Apocalyptism: Hey, man, have you heard? There’s this bunch of, like, crazy nerds out there, who think that some kind of unspecified huge nerd thing is going to happen. What a bunch of wackos! It’s geek religion, man.

I’ve heard (many) other definitions of the Singularity attempted, but I usually find them to lack separate premises and conclusions. For example, the old Extropian FAQ used to define the “Singularity” as the Inflection Point, “the time when technological development will be at its fastest” and just before it starts slowing down. But what makes this an interesting point in history apart from its definition? What are the consequences of this assumption? To qualify as a school of thought or even a thesis, one needs an internal structure of argument, not just a definition.

If you’re wondering which of these is the original meaning of the term “Singularity”, it is the Event Horizon thesis of Vernor Vinge, who coined the word.
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I've been thinking about the singularity since Vernor Vinge first coined the term. Unfortunately, I've never read anyone but Vinge who didn't sound like a nut while talking about it, and that includes Kurzweil and Joy.

Vinge himself originally set the timeline at "within thirty years" of 1993, so 2023ish for Vinge. I don't think that's an unreasonable time scale for what Vinge describes. For Kurzweil's more enthusiastic predictions, there's no telling.

Seriously, though, if you're interested, you should start with Vinge's original paper, presented at the NASA sponsored Vision-21 symposium.
 
I read the same article in rs when it came out. I got the impression that he's probably right about the singularity but optimistic about the time frame to a fault. Basically he's an atheist that hopes it happens in his lifetime so he can live forever. I also hope I live to see it but I doubt it. Maybe my son will...
 
Furcas said:
The first thing everybody should know before even attempting to discuss the Singularity, is what people mean by the word. I'll let Eliezer Yudkowsky explain:

http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singularity-schools/
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I reject the notion that non-superhuman intelligences can't guess at what superhuman intelligences would do.

It's kinda like people saying God works in mysterious ways. Then extrapolating that idea of the unknowable perfection of God and saying something like; God would lift a stone that he made too heavy to lift (i.e. he is omnipotent enough to negate paradoxes).

They're just word games, with no play in actual logic.
 
also i totally don't get how that rs article would make anybody more inclined to believe kurzweil, considering he talks about resurrecting his dead dad from his (ray's) memories and seems to honestly believe that they would be mostly the same person
 
If you want an easy access point, try watching the Ghost in the Shell movies and TV series. It provides an insight into society on the verge of one of the aspects of the Singularity, merging man and machine and enhancing the human body and mind and the blurring of technology and the person.

The various aspects of the Singularity are indeed fascinating, although the one thing I think most people get wrong is the time scales involved, as it won't be happening today or tomorrow.

I doubt GAF is the best place to have a serious discussion about it. Will probably descend into people quoting The Matrix or something.
 
Zaptruder said:
I reject the notion that non-superhuman intelligences can't guess at what superhuman intelligences would do.

It's kinda like people saying God works in mysterious ways. Then extrapolating that idea of the unknowable perfection of God and saying something like; God would lift a stone that he made too heavy to lift (i.e. he is omnipotent enough to negate paradoxes).

They're just word games, with no play in actual logic.
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I hate those word games too, but that's not what the Event Horizon and Intelligence Explosion 'schools' of the Singularity are about. Do you think you could anticipate Deep Blue's (or even Kasparov's) strategy in a game of chess? Of course not. The only thing you can anticipate is that every move will be played with the goal of winning the game. If we know the goals of a superhuman AI, we can make a good bet as to the kind of outcome it will try to make happen, but there is no way to know how the AI will try to achieve its goals unless we're that smart ourselves.

That doesn't mean there's anything inherently mysterious or unknowable or perfect about the AI. Nor does it mean that logical contradictions can somehow be bypassed. It just means that it's not possible to predict the actions of a mind with a halfway decent degree of accuracy unless we're about as smart as that mind.
 
Dani said:
If you want an easy access point, try watching the Ghost in the Shell movies and TV series. It provides an insight into society on the verge of one of the aspects of the Singularity, merging man and machine and enhancing the human body and mind and the blurring of technology and the person.
Click to expand...
i actually totally agree with that, i think the gits tv series does a pretty good job of guessing what society would be like with the ability to merge man and computer, to enhance human skills with machines...especially in the fact that the show has a huge disparity between socioeconomic groups; there are better off people and esp military having access to these new technologies, while there are still urban poor living in slums, rampant growth of new types of crimes. overall society is not really remarkably changed by the inventions in that show, and i think the reality will probably be somewhat closer to that than the overnight utopia that kurzweil predicts.
 
This stuff really landed on my radar a few summers ago in a Wired article:

http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/16-04/ff_kurzweil

After more and more reading, I determined that kurzweil is unrealistic but for good reasons. Someone of his stature needs to be aggressively pushing ideas to plant the seeds into other minds so they can blossom into something 20-40 years down the road.

People fear wars between nations and religions. I fear wars between people that choose to evolve and those that want to "stay behind". To me it's the greatest limiting factor in achieving the singularity in our lifetimes. There is going to be a tremendous push back against this when it comes close to reality. You can already see it today with people's attitudes with steroids, plastic surgery or other means of enhancements. There is a tendency in our society to push back against these things.

We are still working through our relationship with social media via computers. We haven't even established the boundaries of how integrated and "aware" we want the rest of the wired world to be in our lives. There is a great apprehension with even simple ideas like chip implanting, national id cards or video cameras everywhere. These are small potatoes when compared to something as futuristic and invasive as allowing nanobots inside your body to augment your existence. It's a huge gulf that would need to be crossed.

That's why I think there almost needs to be a literal break from humanity (Earth) to allow these ideas to flourish and be accepted. I almost feel like only a society that lives off of this planet will be open-minded and accepting enough to redefine what humanity is. Much like how the New World was a safe haven for those that didn't fit into the societies of Europe ... there needs to be a place for humans to go that want to explore leaving their decaying vessels.

So obviously, for something like that to occur, you are talking about centuries .. not decades.
 
Furcas said:
Do you think you could anticipate Deep Blue's (or even Kasparov's) strategy in a game of chess? Of course not.
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Given sufficiently large periods of time of course I could. That time period gets exponentially shorter if I get access to better calculation tools. Deep Blue doesn't do anything mysterious, or even anything most people would call intelligent, it just does it really fast. My position on this whole singularity business is that no one really knows what "designing something to be more intelligent than a human" even means. I guess a human with built in arithmetic accelerators, aka a computer, would be pretty cool; but not fundamentally any different in capability than a human that used external calculating tools.
 
The singularity already happened long ago. It was the neolithic revolution. The truth is that we are living in THE FUTURE long after the singularity... it's 2010 remember!
 
The idea of post-humanism is both exciting and unsettling at the same time. I guess that the idea of making human's essentially "useless" in the fields of technology will radically change the dynamic of society. We won't have as much control over our destiny anymore and might find it hard to adjust to the rapid acceleration brought on by the super intelligence we created. Even if it acts to the supreme benefit of humanity, we might not be able to keep up, and eventually conflict will emerge.

I think these people working to secure immortality in their lifetimes need to start slowing down and begin accepting their own mortality as a distinct possibility, even a welcoming one. How will you live forever in a computer screen without losing your sanity? What happens when they copy your consciousness into a computer database? Are you cloned? Will the fields of art, philosophy, or athlete accomplishments mean anything to an immortal intelligence occupying a computer? Will anything matter since you can't contribute to the expansion of your own species?

I'm all for A.I. helping to improve our lives, but I think we need to actively curb the rate of change so society can still exist as more biological or mechanical changes to our own existence emerges.
 
Kurzweil seems to be the popular singularity poster boy. His name typically comes up in layman singularity conversation. But as Furcas points out, the singularity term has been twisted to mean different things. Here's a link to a Kurzweil talk about The Implications of the Law of Accelerating Returns, which is his interpretation of how technology improves exponentially and will eventually lead to the development of machine intelligence.
 
Vaporak said:
Given sufficiently large periods of time of course I could. That time period gets exponentially shorter if I get access to better calculation tools. Deep Blue doesn't do anything mysterious, or even anything most people would call intelligent, it just does it really fast.
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I'm not sure what your point is. You're saying you can do what Deep Blue does, but a lot more slowly. Well, okay. I'm sure a slightly dim human could do what Einstein did, if you gave him a thousand years to do it. Achieving a goal more quickly is part of what greater intelligence allows.

Using "better calculation tools" counts as extending your intelligence. Hell, just using a pen and paper to write down each possible chess move would count as extending your intelligence, since I doubt you could mentally visualize the exponentially growing tree of possibilities.

To do what Deep Blue does, you need to have a cognitive architecture equivalent to Deep Blue's; it's that simple.

My position on this whole singularity business is that no one really knows what "designing something to be more intelligent than a human" even means. I guess a human with built in arithmetic accelerators, aka a computer, would be pretty cool; but not fundamentally any different in capability than a human that used external calculating tools.
Click to expand...

There are many approaches to defining superhuman intelligence. One way is simply to take a set of goals, and say that a superhuman intelligence is something that can reach these goals a lot more efficiently than any human can.

Another way is to take each aspect of human intelligence and define a superhuman intelligence as something that is significantly better at all of these things. A superhuman AI would be better at pattern recognition, at learning, at inference, at reasoning, at decision-making, and so forth.
 
Furcas said:
I'm not sure what your point is. You're saying you can do what Deep Blue does, but a lot more slowly. Well, okay. I'm sure a slightly dim human could do what Einstein did, if you gave him a thousand years to do it. Achieving a goal more quickly is part of what greater intelligence allows.

Using "better calculation tools" counts as extending your intelligence. Hell, just using a pen and paper to write down each possible chess move would count as extending your intelligence, since I doubt you could mentally visualize the exponentially growing tree of possibilities.

To do what Deep Blue does, you need to have a cognitive architecture equivalent to Deep Blue's; it's that simple.



There are many approaches to defining superhuman intelligence. One way is simply to take a set of goals, and say that a superhuman intelligence is something that can reach these goals a lot more efficiently than any human can.

Another way is to take each aspect of human intelligence and define a superhuman intelligence as something that is significantly better at all of these things. A superhuman AI would be better at pattern recognition, at learning, at inference, at reasoning, at decision-making, and so forth.
Click to expand...


Not to mention the fact that a purpose built machine can calculate without any "noise" or distraction beyond the task set to it, which has advantages of result clarity, as well as speed. And if it's cognitive functions are "smart" enough it may be able to reach conclusions above and beyond those set to it, if they're relevant.

Thunder Monkey said:
I fucked a toaster... am I part mammal, part machine?
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You're just a primate with a burnt peins.
 
Gettysburger said:
eventually the only thing humans will be able to do that robots cannot will be artistic
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The "rules" of art are incredibly easy to teach a computer and there are dozens of programs that create art from scratch following simple rules of proportion, color, symmetry and even randomness.

The only thing preventing computers from creating completely believable art in any style, or even original work, are purely mechanical limitations, not cognitive.
 
OuterWorldVoice said:
The "rules" of art are incredibly easy to teach a computer and there are dozens of programs that create art from scratch following simple rules of proportion, color, symmetry and even randomness.

The only thing preventing computers from creating completely believable art in any style, or even original work, are purely mechanical limitations, not cognitive.
Click to expand...

there will be giant debate in 2450 "is robot-art art?" that is, before we are all gassed to death.
 
it'll be just like the best ending in deus ex, where jc merges with helios and suddenly our entire world government is run by a machine that knows what everybody wants and we can all eat candy bars
 
A machine is a mathematical grid and so is a human. The merging of the two consists of understanding the basic mathematical principles and the patterns of matter and the universe. The next evolution in electronic engineering will come about after we get rid of the 2D binary numeral system and embrace the true hologram based nature of binary. This can only be accomplished once we integrate polarity into the system, because right now there no such thing as "negative", we bypass that by looking at the Most Significant Bit and if there is a carry. That is just plain redundant. I will be speaking with some of my professors to brainstorm how such system could be implemented without the whole engineering establishment just crumbling before our eyes.
 
EmCeeGramr said:
it'll be just like the best ending in deus ex, where jc merges with helios and suddenly our entire world government is run by a machine that knows what everybody wants and we can all eat candy bars
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a benevolent dictator is the best form of government, JC

Gettysburger said:
eventually the only thing humans will be able to do that robots cannot will be artistic
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doubt it, computers are already starting to do this stuff now
whether it constitutes 'art' is really up to your definition, if that includes "only humans can make it" then yeah...
 
Here's a talk by Eliezer Yudkowsky, entitled Strong AI and Recursive Self-improvement:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-821191370462819511&ei=IWtNS5KqLoqjlAeF74SFCA&q=yudkowsky#

Eliezer Yudkowsky of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence speaks at the Bay Area Future Salon on the topic of "Recursive Self-Improvement and the World's Most Important Math Problem." In 1965, I. J. Good suggested that smarter minds can make themselves even smarter, leading to a runaway positive feedback that I. J. Good termed the "intelligence explosion". But how do you build an Artificial Intelligence such that it remains stable and friendly through the ascent to superintelligence? Eliezer Yudkowsky talks about the implications of recursive self-improvement, and how it poses the most important math problem of this generation
Click to expand...

It's about 2 hours long, but it's very much worth watching, IMO.
 
ToxicAdam said:
That's why I think there almost needs to be a literal break from humanity (Earth) to allow these ideas to flourish and be accepted. I almost feel like only a society that lives off of this planet will be open-minded and accepting enough to redefine what humanity is.
Click to expand...

"I am Andrew Ryan, and I am here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow?

'No,' says the man in Washington, 'it belongs to the poor.'
'No,' says the man in the Vatican, 'it belongs to God.'
'No,' says the man in Moscow, 'it belongs to everyone.'

I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose...

Rapture.

A city where the artist would not fear the censor,
where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality,
where the great will not be constrained by the small.

And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well."
―Andrew Ryan

:D
 
Lost Fragment said:
Not only that, but the shit he talks about is pretty far out compared to what I've read before. Immortality through being able to back up our consciousnesses to computers? Resurrecting the dead? Having our nanobots spread to all corners the cosmos, creating a "conscious" universe? WAT?
Click to expand...

I imagine this is kind of the dealbreaker here. When you back up your conciousness, wouldn't you be backing up a digital copy? So that new digital conciousness is someone else, and when you die your perspective won't just merge with that in the machine, you'll be dead.
 
Ok, I'm up to speed. Thanks guys.

Plumbob said:
I imagine this is kind of the dealbreaker here. When you back up your conciousness, wouldn't you be backing up a digital copy? So that new digital conciousness is someone else, and when you die your perspective won't just merge with that in the machine, you'll be dead.
Click to expand...

That story has been written, friend, and actually came out not too long ago and starred Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in a period piece. Must see!
 
Plumbob said:
I imagine this is kind of the dealbreaker here. When you back up your conciousness, wouldn't you be backing up a digital copy? So that new digital conciousness is someone else, and when you die your perspective won't just merge with that in the machine, you'll be dead.
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That just brings up a bigger question.

What is you?

PantherLotus said:
Ok, I'm up to speed. Thanks guys.



That story has been written, friend, and actually came out not too long ago and starred Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman in a period piece. Must see!
Click to expand...

That's Hollywood mang!

We'se talkin' real wurld shiat!

I can't wait to talk to my computerized brain one day.
 
Plumbob said:
I imagine this is kind of the dealbreaker here. When you back up your conciousness, wouldn't you be backing up a digital copy? So that new digital conciousness is someone else, and when you die your perspective won't just merge with that in the machine, you'll be dead.
Click to expand...

That's why I think of it not as 'backed up', but as transferred. Then everything is dandy.
 
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