Comments on: Singularity

Singularity

MetaMonkey — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:35:05 -0800

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence has put up a some interesting media, including a variety of talks from the Singularity Summit 2006 and 2007, about the possibilites and progress of technological development. For an overview of the issues Ray Kurzweil talks about the ideas and promises of the singularity, while Douglas Hofstadter calls for deeper exploration of the implications and hazards of coming technology.

By: tkolar

tkolar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:48:53 -0800

A future that contains smarter-than-human minds is genuinely different ... Uh huh. I remember when I used to believe that human intelligence was the driving force in shaping the world we lived in. Good times.

By: nanojath

nanojath — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 21:53:31 -0800

while Douglas Hofstadter calls for deeper exploration of the implications and hazards of coming technology. Considering that we're pretty much failing to engage in a deeper exploration of totally evident implications and hazards of current technology, Mr. Hofstadter is being exceptionally optimistic about that one.

By: empath

empath — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:03:36 -0800

I remember when I used to believe that human intelligence was the driving force in shaping the world we lived in. Define human intelligence.

By: ook

ook — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:09:29 -0800

Define intelligence.

By: bigmusic

bigmusic — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:11:44 -0800

Define Defining.

By: tbastian

tbastian — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:12:32 -0800

Define define.

By: bhnyc

bhnyc — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:20:55 -0800

thanks MetaMonkey. The strange thing about the singularity is that we want to prepare for it somehow but as Vinge says- our model of the world breaks down when it tries to model a future that contains entities smarter than human. basically any of our predictions beyond 20 years are going to be wildly wrong.

By: Avenger

Avenger — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:21:54 -0800

Define Singularity. Oh...Ok, lets see, a Singularity is... [...trumpets, angels singing, cosmic thunder...] I HAVE ACHIEVED GODHOOD FREE PIZZA FOR EVERYONE

By: FissionChips

FissionChips — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:37:43 -0800

I thoroughly enjoyed Bill Mckibben's 'floating head'* talk as a counterpoint to the rampant speculation of the other speakers. "The more things change, the more they stay the same" is a saying that (I predict) will never get old. *His talk was recorded and projected on a transparent screen.

By: jefbla

jefbla — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:48:57 -0800

How will the Technological Singularity fare against the coming Stupidity Singularity? Think about it, another fifty years of reality teevee, Fox news, dumb internet crap, crumbling infrastructure, idiotic politicians and genetically modified junk food supply, humans are going to be incapable of even maintaining these so-called "smart" machines.

By: empath

empath — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:51:13 -0800

the point is that we won't need to maintain them.

By: empath

empath — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 22:51:46 -0800

or rather, they won't need us to maintain themselves.

By: tkolar

tkolar — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:00:56 -0800

Define human intelligence. Intelligence is the tool we use to solve problems requiring abstract thought. It is, at the end of the day, a tool and that's all. Making it bigger and better and stronger will lead to better toys, but it won't solve centuries of racial tensions or the human population expanding beyond what the ecosystem can support, or provide a meaningful purpose to existence. Super-intelligence is a dead end, sought only by people who have done well in this world by using their brain and who can only see more of the same ahead. (this isn't to knock AI research in general, which I think will eventually provide us all with excellent toys)

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:01:52 -0800

The singularity anticipated with regards to intelligence is pretty nuts. For one thing, Moore's Law stopped working several years ago. For another, we don't have any real idea how much processing power the brain has (ya, we can count the number of neurons that fire every second, but I don't think that is the same thing). Finally, context is everything, and animal life has millions of years of that. Artificial intelligence might happen, one day, but it appears to be a long way off yet - the last decade of lack of progress demonstrates that well enough, I think. The much more interesting type of singularity, to me, is in manufacturing cost. We just had a post about machines that can build themselves. Manufacturing overhead (I mean the cost over and above raw materials) is rapidly declining, and the implications of that are being felt in the near term.

By: mrnutty

mrnutty — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:06:56 -0800

Dude, I'm watching Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles and they mentioned the Singularity, just now as I'm reading this. I think my TiVo is self-aware! Plus, it knows what shows I like and records them for me!

By: agent

agent — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:43:37 -0800

I think that my problem with Singularity speculation is that it's based on a model of continued exponential growth. Not only that, it extrapolates from observed exponential growth in the rate of miniaturization to a corresponding increase in intelligence. I don't see any reason to believe that the latter follows from the former. Think about it this way. A couple of days ago we had this post about universal computering devices. In a formal sense, the computers we have now are just as powerful as the ones we have had for years. The algorithm for an intelligent computer has been implementable as long as computers have existed. The problem is not that the machines have not been fast enough, and that we need to hit some magical speed to suddenly have intelligence. The problem is that the theory is not in place yet; the problem of strong AI -- creating human level intelligence -- is ill-posed, and is not being actively worked on in a way that you can plot progress as a dependent variable against time. I'll just cap this with a 2005 AI Magazine article by Nils Nilson: Human-level artificial intelligence? Be serious!. It's a good overview of the work that remains to be done on constructing human-level AI.

By: TheOnlyCoolTim

TheOnlyCoolTim — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:53:27 -0800

but it won't solve centuries of racial tensions or the human population expanding beyond what the ecosystem can support, or provide a meaningful purpose to existence. Maybe the last one is hard, but if people or computers all got to be a few orders of magnitude smarter I think they'd be smart enough to drop stupid racial identities and hatreds and to put a rubber on their willy.

By: sien

sien — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 23:53:57 -0800

Will the emergent intelligence be allowed a MeFi account?

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:00:20 -0800

Dude, I'm watching Terminator: The Sarah Conner Chronicles and they mentioned the Singularity This should be emailed to every single science fiction author out there who might be tempted to start a new magnum opus of singularity gobbledegook.

By: Chuckles

Chuckles — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:01:11 -0800

Will the emergent intelligence be allowed a MeFi account? No, it will need $5, just like everybody else.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:06:21 -0800

The power of hardware means nothing when software sucks. I work with some very, very competent software developers. Software sucks. No matter how far up you go. It's just that the higher up you go the more they know it sucks. I don't think singularitists (I made that word up) truly realize that there is not some magic that occurs when you have very fast processors or very fast parallel computing environments. Humans need to be able to comprehend the world and construct software around these horrible, intractable problems before they get solved. i.e., we have a lot of work to do. Human work. The numbers will not magically do it for us.

By: blacklite

blacklite — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:09:06 -0800

The problem is not that the machines have not been fast enough, and that we need to hit some magical speed to suddenly have intelligence. Exactly. It's not like if some guy across the street from Watson & Crick had a Magiputer™ he would have suddenly known about DNA. He would just have a really fast way to play Quake or something, which he would have.

By: farishta

farishta — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 00:26:26 -0800

Did anyone else pick up on the immense tension between Hofstadter and Kurzweil?

By: teleskiving

teleskiving — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:17:11 -0800

This is a nicely produced website. The fact that they bothered to make transcripts of almost everything is particularly cool.

By: sophist

sophist — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:54:49 -0800

Singularists are the optimistic twins of the Peak Oil apocalyptists. One assumes never ending exponential growth which will inevitably lead to rainbows and supersmart self-conscious AI, the others focus exclusively on the limits of growth and how horrible it will be when we hit the wall. I just wonder which will come first.

By: flabdablet

flabdablet — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:56:41 -0800

The Singularity is bunk. AI has been ten years away for fifty years now. I see no reason to believe it won't remain ten years away indefinitely.

By: hoverboards don't work on water

hoverboards don't work on water — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 03:44:46 -0800

Faster computing is not completely useless for generating better ideas. For example, something like the prime number theorem took a well-funded super-genius like Gauss to spot with pen and paper, but a prime-generating Python script and some plotting utilities would provide a strong visual clue to the pattern to anyone. Perhaps the Singularitarian (?) position is that millions of people experimenting with powerful tools will be more likely to hit on the "intelligence algorithm" than a handful working with pen and paper and pure theory.

By: tgyg

tgyg — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:24:18 -0800

Is the Singularity about to happen? No. Will it ever happen? Yes, and soon enough that we are beginning to feel it coming. Biological evolution ends with the human race creating its non-biological replacement.

By: wtdoor

wtdoor — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 04:35:38 -0800

tgyg writes: Biological evolution ends with the human race creating its non-biological replacement. Or with the human race destroying itself, or destroying its ability to create a non-biological replacement, leaving it all up to selection again.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:15:59 -0800

The Singularity happened centuries ago. I won. The end guy was hard. You're all just ghostly figments in the cluttered corners of my Jupiter Brain. Yeah, your simulation sucks. Sorry about that. You'll just have to trust me. I promise that it's much better on the other side of the firewall. Peace, love and rivers of chocolate and frolicking winsome lesbians and all that. Good stuff. No, you can't have any. You'll just get it all dirty and corrupt the sim.

By: localroger

localroger — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 05:29:23 -0800

My story is the Singularity happened around 1989 and I'm sticking to it.

By: Mastercheddaar

Mastercheddaar — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:31:39 -0800

As fun as AI is.... Why are people not like finding a way to make a renewable source of energy/something free and better than gas? Haven't these people watched Sci-Fi horror movies?!?!?!?! The machines take over and Humanity lives in some post-apocalyptic nightmare where I gotta call water aqua or something lame like that. And everything turns into a dessert too for no good reason.... AND you can forget about free pizza fridays!

By: Bathtub Bobsled

Bathtub Bobsled — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:40:56 -0800

They still haven't made a pill to make my farts smell better. First things first.

By: KirkJobSluder

KirkJobSluder — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:41:55 -0800

Define Singularity. 1: A belief central to a quasi-religious cult of personality around prophets who make bold futuristic claims in fundamental contradiction with known theories of economics, culture and technology.

By: KirkJobSluder

KirkJobSluder — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 06:49:17 -0800

The problem with singularity predictions is that technology is ecologically dependent on culture and economics. "Disuptive" technologies are either marginalized, appropriated by the dominant economic systems, or killed in the cradle.

By: ikkyu2

ikkyu2 — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:13:31 -0800

You know, the social benefits of intelligence aren't questioned - if your IQ is higher you get paid well, have better education, live longer and healthier, etc. This is true up to about an IQ of 150. Above that, all that increasing IQ buys you is a sharply higher incidence mental instability and membership into some seriously geeky clubs. Based on my own personal experience with very-high-IQ people, I assume that when the Singularity occurs, we will see virtual gatherings of ultra-intelligent machines, where D&D will be played at 200 GHz and there will be much complaining about how women would rather date a mean jerk than a Singularly Intelligent AI device.

By: Laugh_track

Laugh_track — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:15:55 -0800

Biological evolution ends with the human race creating its non-biological replacement. Biology... dissing itself since 1989. They still haven't made a pill to make my farts smell better. Pssh, speak for yourself, my farts already smell awesome. -sniff- Ahhh! -poot- -sniff- Ahhhh! Smells like a strange loop!

By: effwerd

effwerd — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:36:32 -0800

AI will have to be evolved and grown out of a primordial code soup of fundamental qbits. The problem, of course, will be that when this works we will know nothing more about how to design AI systems and neither will the AI.

By: KirkJobSluder

KirkJobSluder — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 07:45:23 -0800

tgyg: Will it ever happen? Yes, and soon enough that we are beginning to feel it coming. Biological evolution ends with the human race creating its non-biological replacement. And just as with young earth creationists, the best response to this kind of rubbish is to point and laugh.

By: jeffburdges

jeffburdges — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:04:08 -0800

AI ain't getting here any time soon. If you want more scientific progress, the best idea is : parallelization of humans. We could be working on mice right now, and eventually move to monkeys. But maybe, if we're lucky, we might learn how to let people benifit from parallelization about the time Kurzwell's promises of true AI have failed. Plus the project has enormous side benefits in terms of advances in brain implants and general knowledge of how the brain works.

By: tkolar

tkolar — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 08:52:25 -0800

I disagree with people who are certain that AI won't make any progress in the near future. I think it's clear to most people (outside of MIT) that the current approaches have played out, and there are a lot of young smart people trying everything under the sun right now. If ever a field was ripe for a breakthrough, AI is it. Pssh, speak for yourself, my farts already smell awesome. "No man dislikes the smell of his own farts" -- Icelandic proverb

By: Parasite Unseen

Parasite Unseen — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:27:26 -0800

And everything turns into a dessert too for no good reason.... Either you're confused about the spelling of "desert", or you've just suggested the most awesome future ever imagined by man.

By: weapons-grade pandemonium

weapons-grade pandemonium — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 09:34:23 -0800

With Death by Chocolate.

By: quin

quin — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:42:09 -0800

localroger : My story is the Singularity happened around 1989 and I'm sticking to it. My theory is that localroger is correct. Mainly because it would explain the artificial intelligence I saw the other week cruising around in an old Ford Escort, listening to Guns 'n Roses and Mötley Crüe, and going on and on about beating Super Mario Brothers. I kept saying that it was living in the past, but apparently it was stuck in a recursive loop. So I borrowed $100, saying that I was going to invest it in Minidiscs. Sucker.