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The Singularity is not coming

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Re: The Singularity is not coming

#81
post #39

I think the advocates of the singularity see it as coming from an explosion of the possibilities of technology rather than an explosion of science in general. Kurzweil himself mentions how to the average research scientist, science appears slow and linear (with jumps most coming when a scientist gets a different set of tools to work with). > Let’s have a hypothetical AI that researches artificial intelligence, and th…

You don't understand intelligence. Doubling the circuits doubles the speed of the intelligence, but it has no effect on it's quality . You are assuming the existence of not just an intelligent parallel algorithm but an infinitely scalable one (i.e. one that could actually take advantage of more circuits)! Because without that, you don't need to double the circuits - you could just give them more time. Concepts that a…

You don't understand intelligence. Doubling the circuits doubles the speed of the intelligence, but it has no effect on it's quality.

Uh the singularity may be a crack-pot idea in the end but it seems like brings out a whole of slew crackpot refutations.

No, I don't understand flexible human intelligence or even animal intelligence fully and neither do you or other human. That's why it's not been programmed.

I do know that doubling circuit size doesn't double speed.

People have a really hard time admitting that some people are truly fundamentally smarter than others.

And you'd have a hard coming up with any evidence for this "fundamental" rather than relative intelligence difference.

The singularity, crackpot or not, is based on the hypothesis that there is a single "neocortical algorithm". It may indeed be dubious theory but it's cobbled together from some real evidence. If you're going to have counter-arguments to this, why not do the same?

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Given this, I'm not sure why singularity promoters give that much of a shit whether people believe it. In my case that would be because the default scenario for a technological singularity is Eternal Doom. By default, if AI researchers do not pay extreme attention, the first smarter-than-human AI will have different goals than we do, and recognize us as a threat to those goals and eliminate us all. Or squash us lik…

It's not the first smarter than human AI that is the threat. It's the first self-improving AI that people have to worry about. It can start out at a much lower than human intelligence (whatever that means) but as long it can keep improving it could turn into the nightmare scenario. The safeguards need to be built into the self improving AI, no matter how 'dumb' it starts out as.

Well, any path that lead to superhuman intelligence is dangerous. Self-improving AI may be the likeliest, but it's not the only one. Think Upload, brain-computer interfaces, or computing overhang, for instance.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#83
post #8

What does that mean "it's not coming". Isn't pretty much everything "coming" eventually?

If the Singularity is defined as intelligence explosion following the creation of strong AI, and if intelligence explosion is impossible, then the Singularity is not coming, even in the far future. Progress will just carry on linearly.

Saying something is impossible, even in the far future, is just stupid. If you think about it, humans are only familiar with an infinitely small sliver of what's out there in the universe. We're taking the little knowledge we have, and saying AI intelligence explosion is impossible. That's like a baby saying he's stood up before, and walking is just impossible.

Just seems silly.

Re: The Singularity is not coming

#84
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because the human brains can only communicate and acquire knowledge at a limited rate. This causes the "exponential decrease of discovery impact of each succeeding researcher" that the original post refers to, but he misses the point completely. We can't 'stand on the shoulders of giants' until we've climbed up there, slowly and painfully. An AI can just download the lot. And share any new discoveries with the hive m…

it's sci fi, but we haven't ruled out that human brains can't acquire knowledge at rates orders of magnitudes faster than current learning methods. Big advances in neuroscience and linguistics could make this possible. Right now, the limits on our bandwidth is language and our sensory inputs. It's not completely ridiculous to think we could encode certain kinds of knowledge in more compact forms, and transmit them vi…

The singularity idea does not care how the self-improvement feedback occurs.
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