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Re: undefined

#21

Post by khitchdee »

gojomo wrote: post #13

This article is lazy, superficial mockery. (So, it's totally on-brand for the modern Salon .) * Knocks Vinge as having "lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas" – as if he'd tried, and failed, instead of just been a successful professor & award-winning SF author. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge ) * Sneers at Kurzweil as if he's one-act Singularity huckster – when in f…

"big changes are coming, we'd better get ready!"

that seems to suggest someone else other than us is creating thise changes and they are going to catch us unawares. The rate at which change happens in technology is painstakingly slow. Each rev of a product typically takes a year. Scientific research typically takes even longer. At such a slow rate of change its hard to imagine something is going to hit us in the face before we know it. Instead, it's more likely we'll chart a slow path towards the future. Slow enough that even somehting like the singularity, if it were to happen would occur over an extended period of time which would mean it would no longer be a singularity but a far more gradual change.

Re: undefined

#22

Post by jknoepfler »

I lost a good friend to the Kurzweil cult. They genuinely dropped everything to join a "think tank" about how to handle the imminent singularity. They simply could not process the fact that Kurzweil's empirical claims are juvenile fantasy at best, outright willfully ignorant at worst, nor could they deal with the idea that it is meaningless to create elaborate closed-system logical deductions in a fundamentally open world.

For context, I have a background in neuroscience and computer science... the claims about brain modeling are particularly ferociously ignorant in an era when we don't even have the foggiest macroscopic clue about the neurobiological mechanisms that enable reasoning, and in which fundamental neuroscience hasn't evolved substantially at any level above protein expression pathways in the last 25 years. If you have a thick illusion of understanding regarding how the brain works, don't feel alone - it plagued professionals in neuroscience for the 40-50 years who felt that the big breakthrough in unifying AI, systems neuroscience, and neurobiology must be right around the corner. Every new decade just deepens how crude these original notions were, and how blatantly false our estimates of our knowledge were.

The singularity is not near. It wasn't near in 2000, it won't be near in 2100, and my guess would be that it will never be near, in the same way the end times in Revelations won't be near anytime soon.

Frankly I'm happy to have people around who care about preventing improbable catastrophes, but biological and nuclear warfare, running out of water, collision with a sufficiently destructive meteor, a freak volcanic eruption off the known charts... even for the love of god encountering hostile extraterrestrials (? why not) are higher on the likely threat list in my head.

I think the attraction lies mostly in the fact that the argument avoids the "nasty bits" of reality that make real systems hard. Epidemiology, for example, has a lot to say about preventing the spread of humanity threatening diseases. But the truth is in the gritty details, not in high flown logical deductions.

Re: undefined

#23

Post by mr_toad »

I doubt that singularitarians, or singularitarianism even exists. The idea that it’s somehow the agenda of the SV rich and powerful is a ludicrous straw man.

What next, the Church of Drakes Equation?

Re: undefined

#24

Post by yk »

There are of course quite a few crazies among singularitarians, however some are not. On the other hand, almost all critiques of the singularity are squarely in the "they have to be wrong, or I would need to sit down and read a book" genre, case in point, this article. Clearly the author did not bother to read The Singularity is Near, otherwise they would have noted that the entire argument is carefully crafted to subvert the critique that singularitarians need to hit a specific roadmap.

Re: undefined

#25

Post by [deleted] »

gojomo wrote: post #13

This article is lazy, superficial mockery. (So, it's totally on-brand for the modern Salon .) * Knocks Vinge as having "lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas" – as if he'd tried, and failed, instead of just been a successful professor & award-winning SF author. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge ) * Sneers at Kurzweil as if he's one-act Singularity huckster – when in f…

[deleted]

Re: undefined

#26

Post by skybrian »

alexandercrohde wrote: post #11
aalleavitch wrote: post #7

I actually think that the “singularity” in the broad sense that there will come a time in the next century or so where technology will develop too fast for human beings to keep up with it without radical changes to our way of life is almost a foregone conclusion, I don’t see how you can look at the past century and not think there will be radical changes ahead of us. It’s the idea that these changes will be necessari…

> is almost a foregone conclusion I agree. I think an economic singularity should be a given, based on the fact that all economic ROI is at least exponential (pe^(rt)) and has consistently performed exponentially for over 100 years. The notion that this will mean a happiness singularity, complete freedom of choice for everyone, or even human survival are up for debate.

Exponential curves have a tendency to turn into S-curves when fundamental limits are reached. Aircraft might be the most obvious example. Moore's law is looking that way as well.

We can expect this to be true of other business models as well; the question is where the limits are.

Re: undefined

#27

Post by ansible »

> Like many creative types, Vinge lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas.

Um, what? He is a successful CS professor, and beloved hard SF author. Anyone should be happy to be as successful as he is.

At any rate, the singularity is coming, wether we like it out not.

My main argument is: look at Intel Corp.

Intel is emblematic of the entire semiconductor industry. Like with how much they have struggled with the recent process nodes. And look at the industry roadmap, there are only a few nodes left for any kind of silicon lithography.

What is the tech sector going to do when there are no gains to be had with making chips cheaper and higher performance? Do you think Intel's investors are going to be OK if they say they can't make chips and better than they currently are? The stock price will crash, board members and executives will be fired, to be replaced by people promising a return to growth.

Is there a way forward for Intel? Yes, several, falling under the broad category called molecular nanotechnology, which is all about building machines with atomic scale precision. This will allow Intel to build faster chips, but will also be a revolution in other areas too. And then we can reasonable talk about things like biological immortality.

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