The Singularity in Our Past
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The Singularity in Our Past
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Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#2I'm thinking it's more about the evolution of technology. Just because we've had the resources and knowledge to consider ourselves (or even society itself) in a "singularity" doesn't mean it's manifest physically yet. I think quantum computing and the ever-expanding OAuth connections we're seeing will help to bring everybody, literally, closer. Within the next few years I can realistically see a direct connection to a technological singularity. From there I can't even imagine what life on Earth will be like
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#3The idea is that the Singularity would be a point in time where the totality of human expert knowledge would be insufficient to comprehend what an AI (or an AI-designed AI) would be capable of comprehending.
If we think human-level AI is possible, then superhuman AI would also be possible. Note, though, that while not infinite, human cognition is complete, that is, a human or group of humans is only limited by time or resources. No matter how much time we have; a dog will never stumble upon quantum mechanics. But given enough time, a human being can construct an expert knowledge repository, even though he himself is unable to understand some of the intermediary steps or details.
Now, this is where Singularity takes a turn to religion. Some people believe "it" to a future AI with enough physical means to be indistinguishable from a god. Not just a god, but one single God.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#4Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence that invented it.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#5I'm thinking it's more about the evolution of technology. Just because we've had the resources and knowledge to consider ourselves (or even society itself) in a "singularity" doesn't mean it's manifest physically yet. I think quantum computing and the ever-expanding OAuth connections we're seeing will help to bring everybody, literally, closer. Within the next few years I can realistically see a direct connection to…
...ever-expanding OAuth connections...
Uh, what? How does OAuth have anything to do with the singularity?
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#6The idea is that the Singularity would be a point in time where the totality of human expert knowledge would be insufficient to comprehend what an AI (or an AI-designed AI) would be capable of comprehending. If we think human-level AI is possible, then superhuman AI would also be possible. Note, though, that while not infinite, human cognition is complete, that is, a human or group of humans is only limited by time o…
The idea is that the Singularity is whatever version of "in the future things will be different" that a given author thinks will get them an audience.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#7Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence t…
The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.
I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did reflect back on its creators.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#8People seem to underestimate how much engineering will be required for intelligence to interact with the environment successfully. My dog might not be as "intelligent" as me, but he knows a lot more than I do when it comes to information gained through hearing, taste and smell. He has better engineering in many respects. Almost any life form beats me in "intelligence" if you define the test right.
There are already theories about how to build universal AI algorithms (check out Marcus Hutter's stuff at http://www.hutter1.net/). These theories are quite an accomplishment, no doubt. But they boil the problem down to one involving sequence prediction. Let's say that particular form of the problem is now "solved". OK now what sequences would you like to present to the algorithm for training? Ones from the environment? Great, but those will take time to collect. Simulated ones? It takes a lot of knowledge to generate good ones.
For these reasons, I suspect the Singularity is safe from us for while.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#9while human species may be focused on Singularity as a technological event, there is another extremely significant possibility - emergence of human species v2.0, split from inside the current v1.0. It may be helped/facilitated (or may be not) by the technologies - computer, material and/or bio-genetical.
The technological singularity, Skynet style, is possibly just crutches for the human v1.0 where is v2.0 may possibly just skip this step.
Re: The Singularity in Our Past
#10Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence t…
The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did reflect back on its creators.
The qualitative and quantitative improvements from the flynn effect and the population increase reflected back on humanity as a whole, not the creators of the industrial revolution. This is why we've got accelerating growth, but it's also why the second derivative is still small.