For a far, far more entertaining take on the topic I recommend Bruce Sterling's "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole", available from this page:
Singularity Objections
11–15 of 15 posts
Re: Singularity Objections
#12I sent him this objection: We already build very powerful intelligences all the time, in the form of children. But despite having a lot of raw computing power, they aren't very useful without knowledge . They need to learn a lot of things before they can live effectively, solve important problems, etc... Artificial intelligence and intelligence are not fundamentally different things. If you want AI's that turn out be…
It is very hard to flawlessly copy a memory or concept into a child's brain. This might be easier if we wrote the software and designed the hardware.
Re: Singularity Objections
#13I sent him this objection: We already build very powerful intelligences all the time, in the form of children. But despite having a lot of raw computing power, they aren't very useful without knowledge . They need to learn a lot of things before they can live effectively, solve important problems, etc... Artificial intelligence and intelligence are not fundamentally different things. If you want AI's that turn out be…
It is very hard to flawlessly copy a memory or concept into a child's brain. This might be easier if we wrote the software and designed the hardware.
You think the input format will be easier for AI? I don't know. We have evolved knowledge of the input format for children. Meanwhile the majority of our knowledge is inexplicit, and we are bad at turning that into vague English, let alone into something as precise as code.
Back to children, we're so good at teaching them that we manage to teach them many inexplicit ideas without ever having much understanding of those ideas.
Re: Singularity Objections
#14I always have time for a well reasoned argument even if it contradicts my own view. These arguments are not well argued and they contradict my view. I regret reading that article.
I agree. Some of the arguments are even wrong. Specially: "Godel’s Theorem shows that no computer, or mathematical system, can match human reasoning." This is plainly false, in many ways. Gödel't Theorem says nothing about computers (thanks to Turing we know we can't have an algorithm that solves theorems, that was not Gödel's work and Gödel's work still allowed for that possibility to exist), and in any case, we aren't sure our brains are just Turing machines or not, so we can't say neither Gödel nor Turing proved anything about the relative power of computers and human reasoning.
Re: Singularity Objections
#15We might live in a computer simulation and it might be too computationally expensive for our simulators to simulate our world post-singularity. That's an awful lot of "mights".
At least he was careful to use "might." They are soothsaying, after all. Luckily, he won't be able to say "I told you so" when our universe runs out of memory.
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