Technological Singularity

It's a hippy dippy cliche. Nothing like this will happen, and Ray Kurzweil is a crackpot.

Nothing like what will happen? He may be a crackpot--I have no background in those disciplines--but it's not like we're far off some pretty out-there technology. We already have armies of droids, nanotech, quantumn computers...

Yeah, here's a good blog entry from Pharyngula on the subject:

Kurzweil tosses a bunch of things into a graph, shows a curve that goes upward, and gets all misty-eyed and spiritual over our Bold Future. Some places it's OK, when he's actually looking at something measurable, like processor speed over time. In other places, where he puts bacteria and monkeys on the Y-axis and pontificates about the future of evolution, it's absurd. I am completely baffled by Kurzweil's popularity, and in particular the respect he gets in some circles, since his claims simply do not hold up to even casually critical examination.

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I suppose it's a bit like the space race, people saw a man on the moon and thought we'd be zipping off there on our holidays soon enough. You can't really predict what kind of changes are going to occur in technology in the long run with any accuracy.

swears said:

Yeah, here's a good blog entry from Pharyngula on the subject:




I suppose it's a bit like the space race, people saw a man on the moon and thought we'd be zipping off there on our holidays soon enough. You can't really predict what kind of changes are going to occur in technology in the long run with any accuracy.

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Zomg, Swears, OT, but did you see the Dinesh D'Souza post on Pharyngula last night? Hilarious comments.

Seems fair:

Now, it so happens that I didn't really need to read Kurzweil's book to learn this stuff, because I already think he's right. The basic hardware and software trends seem pretty indisputable to me, and the only serious arguments I've ever heard against the eventual development of genuinely intelligent machines all boil down to a thinly veiled belief that there just has to be something more to human intelligence than mere neurons and biochemistry. Well, no there doesn't. The pope's opinions notwithstanding, the evidence to date suggests that the brain really is just a biological computing device.

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http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007172.php

[That's from your link BTW swears...]

vimothy said:

Seems fair:



http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/archives/individual/2005_09/007172.php

[That's from your link BTW swears...]

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Yeah, but we already have AI. That's not what the Singularity is, though. It's when we'll all become computers and have our memories stored in biological harddrives and be able to infinitely upload or download ourselves onto new hardware, so death becomes meaningless.

The ridiculous part of that whole shtick is that we're already biological computers. We're just ones that don't have infinite bandwidth. And we likely never will.

Have you read his book?

That's a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering; you don't actually need to answer it.

vimothy said:

That's a rhetorical question, in case you were wondering; you don't actually need to answer it.

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Um...yes. But it depends on which one you're talking about.

Did you read the 15 page interview with Kurzweil in Rolling Stone a few months ago?

That's a rhetorical question. You don't actually need to answer it.

That's a rhetorical question. You don't actually need to answer it.

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Clever.

That must be why you whipped it out, then, eh?

From the Pharyngula comments:

He was all giddy about nanotechnology and little molecu-bots dancing around in our bloodstream doing disease fighter detail a-la a Doom video game or some such nonsense. Has he never heard of the immune response?(dumbass!)

According to another Wired article last year sometime, he's now so hot and bothered about potentially missing the "singularity". Oh noes! So, he's gone off the deep end with the life extension cultists. It must be some sort of machine envy to think that we'd be so much better off without biological bodies.

Get over it people, there is no mind/body duality! This is the latest delusional faction of people who don't understand that basic fact. They're just as delusional as the god-strokers and new age woo mongers.

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Exactly. We already have moleculebots dancing around in our bloodstream fighting disease! Ffs. Reinventing the wheel.

nomadthethird said:

Zomg, Swears, OT, but did you see the Dinesh D'Souza post on Pharyngula last night? Hilarious comments.

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Not a regular reader, but he is good. Yeah, it boggles the mind when people like D'Souza try to use rational arguments to explain supernatural beliefs: "Yeah, well quantum physics is like, really weird and counterintuitive... a bit like the love of our lord Jesus."

All this singularity stuff, I would have loved it when I was about 12, back when I could basically just choose to believe in stuff 'cuz it sounded cool. There night be some truth to it, I 'spose.

Kevin Drumm is basically correct, though, shirley. At some point, we should get self-improving AI. The rest is details.

it sounds like the worse thing ever, and Kurzweil is just...I dunno, it all comes off like Ponce De Leon in the digital era, this bollocks about conquering death and bringing his dad back to life (as a clone or whatever), just...ugh. which may be only tangentially related to the self-improving AI, I guess. but it still sounds like the worst thing ever. count me 100% out, at least. (I mean, it does also sound a bit much like 3rd-rate William Gibson)

Vimothy, I'm curious tho, why exactly is self-improving AI so inevitable? is it one of those things where it's like "oh if you don't understand highly advanced math & whatever then you'll never get it"? or it there a relatively concise explanation for laypeople? I seem to remember that there's some debate over whether or not at the rate at which data storage capacity increases is actually beginning to level off.

you have to admit also that these Kevin Drumm types sound a wee bit self-important (I seem to remember a quote from a paper of his you linked along the lines of "getting to the Singularity is the single most important thing in the world"). which doesn't necessarily add to or detract from the substance of their arguments, I guess.

I have a pal who did Comp Sci at PHD level and wrote his thesis on AI. I've asked him before if all this way cool Neuromancer-type stuff could happen and he reckons it's possible, but even if we did have computers with has much processing power as the human brain, it would still be a tall order to program or teach them to think in the same way as humans. And that there might actually be physical, universal limits on how smart an artificial mind could be.

Barring disaster, or some limit we don't understand yet, at some point on a long enough timeline CPU power will equal the human brain. Don't think that's very controversial.

In the article I just linked to, Kevin Drumm was criticising Kurzweil and the Transhumanists because in general their programme is trivial and the specifics their programme are stupid. Pretty sure he's not written any papers on the singularity, but I could be wrong.

vimothy said:

At some point, we should get self-improving AI. The rest is details.

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Haven't we had this, in the form of neural nets, for years already? Or is this a more specialised informatic usage of "self-improving"? (Like it learns a language in its spare time or volunteers at a cat shelter?)

Transhumanist people mean AI that is effectively intelligent enough enough build AI better than humans. Computers that can build better computers than humans. That's one of Kurzweil's possible singularities. Eliezer Yudkwosky as well. Probably lots of others.