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NPR Looks to Technological Singularity
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sun Jul 23, 2006 05:36 PM
from the science-driven-by-science-fiction dept.
from the science-driven-by-science-fiction dept.
Rick Kleffel writes to tell us that NPR is featuring a piece with both Vernor Vinge and Cory Doctorow looking at the possibility of the "technological singularity" in the near future. Wikipedia defines a technological singularity as a "hypothetical "event horizon" in the predictability of human technological development. Past this event horizon, following the creation of strong artificial intelligence or the amplification of human intelligence, existing models of the future cease to give reliable or accurate answers. Futurists predict that after the Singularity, posthumans and/or strong AI will replace humans as the dominating force in science and technology, rendering human-specific social models obsolete."
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I for one... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
It might be we still follow the survival of the fittest rule.
But then, how come I sense this disturbing trend that is stripping the single man of all his cultural and material property?
Men in the past had access to renewable water sources because there was a different kind of pollution, didn't fear the sun because of the ozone layer depletion, didn't pollute the land with genetically engineered crop or chemicals. Culturally speaking the trend is stripping man of every set of values which is not money: French revolution fucked the aristocracy. Fascist trolls made us hate nationalism associating it with violence and ignorance (this is an european perspective, in fact usa people were more nationalist, but now you have your own bush troll). Global media fucked home-bred traditions in the west, while Communism did the same in a more violent and explicit way in the east. Corporations have stripped us of science. Scientific experiments in total privacy and patents make not science, but occultism. Now everything is poised to strip us of religion, as the battle is between islamic violent and sexist integralism, neo-con crusaders, zionists will end up with people worn by WWIII refusing anything that remotely sounds like faith.
This is a brain dump not an analysis. Am I wrong? I sure hope i am. But think about it when you have to evaluate any change marketed as "progress".
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Re:I for one... (Score:5, Insightful)
You say that like it might be a bad thing.
Religion is all well and good when it is a personal thing and mayebe OK when you are following the teachings of people (or things) long gone, but once it forms into clumps or groups of people, and it would seem especially once these groups of people start following the teachings of people who are alive now, we start getting problems. It's the high priests, the living leaders of religions who decide they need to spread the word of their god at the point of their follower's swords and that's when the trouble starts!
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Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
Humans are proud of their abilities. They fashion themselves to be the most capable species on earth. If, in the future we are outclassed by artificial intelligence, it seems likely that the we will feel ashamed of ourselves, in a sense. When first-class athletes go past their prime, they are likely to retire out of the game. They do not want to compete as a second-class athlete. Advanced AI could really hurt our feelings, and spawn a desire to give up. I mean, what's the point of life if we aren't on top?
My reply to this was simply: Die fighting for those that you love.
Of course, in such a scenario we might be faced with the choice of enhancing ourselves through biology and cybernetics, so as to compete with our "AI over-lords." But such a choice may really alter what it means and feels to be human. I am not saying whether this is good or bad, but I am saying that if we do decide to take that course we will be sacrificing the human experience for the sake of preservation of the species.
So, I wasn't truly talking about natural selction, and I should have left it out of my previous post. Evolution, however, is WHAT I am talking about. Evolution simply means: A gradual process in which something changes into a different and usually more complex or better form. (from dictionary.com) Of course, biology uses that term within the framework of genetic change over time.
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Re:I for one... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll also note that your whole argument stems from the assumption that the human race will be in some sort of competition with its tools. Frankly, there's no reason to think anything will compete with us as a race unless we design it that way. As individuals, sure, you'll lose your job if a robotic assembly line can do it better, but you only got the job in the first place because of the existing technology that let you steal the job from the rug weaver in africa (or whatever). Live by the sword, die by the sword.
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future = rise of cyborgs? (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem is also mostly with the expectations people have of computers. Everyone wants computers to return deterministic and easily tracable results. For example if I want a value from a database I want to issue a query and have the value returned. I don't want a system that would return it faster but only with 80% of correctness, I don't want any "fuzziness" only exact numbers. In other words people would rather have computers do what computers are doing - calculating stuff fast and exactly, they don't want computers to really act like humans. I think subconsciously we will just never allow computers to reach a human level of soffistication and thus they will probably never surpass us.
On the other hand, what would rather happen is that we will slowly integrate machines into ourselves - litteraly. As soon as the baby is born we will tag it with an RFID, we will implant sensors for infrared vision, ultrasound, we will inject nanoparticles to boost the immune system. In other words I see a cyborg future were we become one with the machines. If anything or anyone will destroy us it will only by ourselves, at the same time if anything helps us prosper, it will also be ourselves. The future is (mostly - short of a big meteorite hitting us) in our hands...
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Great predictions of the unpredictable (Score:5, Insightful)
Brilliant, real brilliant.
Re:Great predictions of the unpredictable (Score:5, Insightful)
I saw that and thought of a recent simulation of an evolving ecosystem. Autotropes, herbivores, predators and parasites all evolved independently in a simulation that simply required growth and survival. I think they are naturally emergent phenomena. You can even explain the existence of defense attorneys and cold-call telephone soliciting this way.
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Obligatory Trolling (Score:5, Funny)
Evolution yes, singularity no (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, I doubt it. I agree with most of the idea of the 6:17 cast and even agree that educational and social changes like widespread literacy may be considered a singularity, but I seriously doubt the timeframe of one generation/30 years they mention. Literacy was adapted over hundreds of years, network communities have been developing for at least 30 years and are still primitive and very far from a "collective mind". For me Wikipedia is "augmented intelligence", but before that I had the Encyclopedia Britannica on my iBook and before that an encyclopedia on my desk, so this to is evolved. And since the Wikipedia is created by so many, it may be considered a primitive product of the "meta intelligence" described.
Btw, the piece from NPR focuses (very trendy) on collaboration and advanced information management, they do not lay great hope on a major breakthrough in AI.
Why the singularity is just late to the party (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is, we are still way surpassed at this by billions of years of evolution. We run on energy from fossil fuels and build from materials we've mined and shipped. On the other hand, we find bacteria living in the most surprising places, we find superior sonar in dolphins and bats to anything we make, and all of it runs on, ultimately, fresh plant matter. We get excited over a myomer that lifted some heavy weight, and I tell you, an elephant can do the same thing given enough food. The sheer variety and efficiency of the ecosystem virtually guarantees that most any way you can think to survive has been done somewhere, somehow, by some living creature. We're worrying about when oil will peak, if we can live another century, and outside our doors the world can go on for eons to come provided we don't break it with our silly toys.
And in a geek-intense environment like this one, I think I can say that it's difficult to beat the end product of a long-term evolutionary algorithm, which itself is an arguably good model of what the world around us acts like, and you all will understand.
I don't deny the coolness of my Apple notebook and I've got a decent number of shelves full of programming books, but I think biomimicry [biomimicry.net] is where it's at. We can go a lot further learning from our world of proteins and DNA and RNA and using - or just having fun with! - what's already there.
We can also get out more and enjoy our analog, fuzzy-logic, neural-net-driven, molecularly-computed fleshy selves.
It's Adam and Eve, not Adam and R689-212 (Score:5, Funny)
Christ. Just wait until the "defend traditional marriage" crowd gets word of this.
Re:Since when ? (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with the video phone is that I can't roll out of bed and answer it. Video conferencing does have it's uses, but I need time to prepare so I don't look like my usual pile of ass who just rolled out of bed. That might make the telemarketers stop calling tho... hmmm
It wasn't technology they guessed wrong, unless you count not having those things the jetsons did, instantly groom and dress out as you got out of bed. Now that would make the video phone take off.
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Re:Since when ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Since when ? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.att.com/attlabs/reputation/timeline/70
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Re:Since when ? (Score:5, Insightful)
How about these:
1791 Luigi Galvani accidentally closing an electrical circuit through a frog's leg, causing it to
jerk violently. This rapidly led to the understanding of how nerves and muscles work.
1879 Louis Pasteur accidentally inoculated chickens with an old cholera culture. The chickens should have died from cholera, but they got sick and then got better. After discovering the mistake, Pasteur re-inoculated the chickens with fresh culture and the chickens didn't even get sick. This lead to the modern vaccination.
1895 Wilhelm Roentgen accidentally discovered X-rays.
1928 Alexander Fleming accidentally discovered that a type of mold (later named Penicillium) significantly inhibited bacterial growth. This lead to antibiotics.
Never assume that all discoveries are predicted before they are "discovered." I would actually say that most INSIGNIFICANT technological advancement is predicted well out, most of these are evolutionary. Many significant advancements are revolutionary and there is no way many of them could be predicted as there was no information related to the new process before the discovery of the process itself.
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Re:Since when ? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:What happens when we get there (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:All intelligence is genuine, not artificial. (Score:5, Interesting)
Artificial primarily means that it comes from artifice (ingenuity) or art. It doesn't (directly) mean it's fake, it just means it's a consciously created work of humankind rather than nature. I think that in modern times with so many knock-offs of natural goods, such as artificial sweetener, the secondary definition has gained the upper hand.
Check out wictionary [wiktionary.org] (It's the hive-mind wikipedia, it must be right!)
When you read enough literature from the 16th and 17th centuries you get more familiar with the original, literal meanings of words such as this one. A favorite subject was to compare art to nature, and they'd freely use the word "artificial" to mean that which comes from human arts. This is not to say that the secondary definition is wrong: for example, when in Book 3 of The Faerie Queene a troll creates an artificial woman to replace the girl who left him out of snow, "virgin" wax and some gold wire (and of course wackiness ensues) it is repeatedly underscored that this "False Florimell" is a cheap immitation.
Anyway, you can chose any definition you like. I sort of prefer artificial intelligence to synthetic intelligence or whatever, just because how you regard the word artificial says a lot about you and what you think of human creativity. And I don't like euphamism treadmills, which is effectively what we're talking about here.
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Re:Ye gods... (Score:5, Informative)
*THE* Singularity -- that Vinge, Kurzweil, Moravec, Yudkowski, and many others smart enough to extrapolate the evidence can't "shut up" about -- is where the exponential curve is near vertical. It's where the primitive bio-human brain can no longer keep up with the accelerating change; hence the need to transcend or die at that point (2030 - 2050).
It's nothing to be afraid of [yudkowsky.net]. Either most of us living today will get to see The Singularity, or our primitive-brain VS. accelerating-tech will finally fuck it all up and none of us will see it. Maybe the brewing "WW3" in the middle east is how we'll join the club of "missing" alien races of Fermi's Paradox [wikipedia.org]?
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Who says it hasn't already happened? (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine an intelligent and curious human from rural Nepal, or Papua New Guinea. Could you explain your job to them?
Could you do your job without the embryonic augmentations we have now, such as Google?
We're partway up that vertical curve now.
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Today's mind vs. tomorrow's (Score:5, Insightful)
Ever hear of the generation gap? The youth of today are different from us--they've been raised from birth in a world of ubiquitous networked computing and ambient findability. (see? I can throw around stupid buzzwords too.) Talk of "The Singularity" is not much different from complaining that your kids spend all their time texting. It's making explicit the fact that you can't imagine keeping up as you age. Well duh. We won't be running the show in 2050--our kids and their kids will.
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Re:invention/discovery... (Score:5, Interesting)
The current thinking is that we will make seed AI, i.e., general intelligence for manipulating software, and that it will improve itself, in an incremental fashion, all the way up to and beyond the level of human intelligence. Of course, this will be done with the help and guidance of programmers but the fear is that by giving it free reign to manipulate itself we will no longer be able to understand what it creates. Not only will this mean that we won't learn anything, but we'll also be unable to control it. As such, most people who seriously consider working on this stuff advocate a goal based higher level of functioning with "friendliness" to humans as being the primary goal and improve yourself as a secondary subgoal. That way, even if the beast gets out of control, the worst it will do is solve world hunger.
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World hunger solution : read on! (Score:5, Funny)
"Thank you for using AI-net. The best solution to "world hunger" appears to be large-scale thermonuclear war. I have taken the liberty of releasing sufficient war-heads to destroy all humans who can get hungry. As a side effect and in accordance with my prime directive (being a friend to humans) all human suffering will be ended.
Have a prosperous existence."
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Re:My god! (Score:5, Interesting)
About 10 years away then...
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