One Man's Thoughts On The Technological Singularity
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One Man's Thoughts On The Technological Singularity
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This man works in the computer industry on artificial intelligence.
I think its perhaps the best argument against the tech singularity I have ever seen. Perhaps a little caustic, but entertaining regardless. ----------------- Epsilon Also, ignore the rest of the thread.
Yeah, some people do need to hear that message...
But man, what a killjoy. 
/engage rant/
I call bullshit, or ignorance. Oh I agree that he makes some good points about the current state of affairs in regards to the popular conception of the singularity versus what will realistically happen. Are we all going to upload our minds into wonderful!new!robot!bodies? no Are we going to have deal with a growing epidemic of obesity and related diseases as the current generation gets older? most definitely yes But is this going to stop us from creating systems so complex we don't understand what is going on? Systems that design their own improvements? nope Its already happening (on a small scale) I, on a weekly basis, personally talk to: A chip designer who spend most of her day making sure that the automated testing for the chips that are designed by genetic algorithms cover all the bases. She doesn't know how the computer comes up with the designs. But as long as the desired inputs result in the desired outputs, and it is cheaper, faster, and less prone to failures/faults then the last revision, they don't care. A Rocket Scientist who works at NASA and is maddeningly vague in his assertions that a singularity will happen within his children's lifetimes. A Software engineer who is working with AI to handle multi-factor identification from passive identification of people (facial recognition, gait measurement, voice analysis, etc). I regularly go drinking with 2 guys who are modeling mice genomes on computer clusters worth more than my parents house, and then seeing if the changes they make do what they think they will. Aside from the people I personally talk to take a look at what people are doing with Cog or have a listen to Futures in Biotech. We are approaching a singularity from 37 different directions because people demand it. We want cures to cancer, aids, and old age. We want faster computers, with more realistic opponents in our games. We want our inboxes free of spam. We want our computers to understand us when we talk to them. We want reliable weather forecasts. He says Science and Tech are Diverging, I fail to see how this will prevent us from reaching a singularity. We are learning more about our world than ever before, faster than before. A singularity is not everything coming together, but simply us loosing our ability to predict change. He says no one is working on it. I call bullshit, I know people who are working on it (or at least pieces of it). We don't have to intend to create a "nanomachine orgy". It will arise out of our desire to stop aids, or the next superbug. It will come out of our demand to regulate our own blood sugar. It will come out of research on restoring sight to the blind and partially blind. He says that no one will pay for it. I say we all are. Every time you get a new computer, or pay your taxes, or send your kid to college, your paying for a little bit of it. I'm not even going to touch #4, there is so much wrong with that, I could go on for another 2 pages. he says we don't know much of anything, I say we know more than he thinks. I'm not that knowledgeable about neurochemistry, so I'll pass on the brain bit. But I do know about AI's. We have had expert systems that are orders of magnitude smarter than us for since the 90s in small areas of knowledge. We are teaching computers more about the world every day. Do you think that Speech Recognition and Natural Language Processing haven't gone anywhere in the past 3 years? We are farther along in cell bio than he thinks. The whole point of a singularity isn't that we will design a computer system that will solve all of our problems, it's that we will design a computer system that will design a computer system that will (after a few thousand iterations). anyway enough ranting. And if anyone is in silicon valley and wants to visit the smartest bar I have ever been in, I'll buy the first round. -Terry ----- "so listen up boy, or pornography starring your mother will be the second worst thing to happen to you today" TF2: Spy
I think this guy is laboring under a misconception of what a "singularity" is...
I think he is too hung up on the root word, and thinking its describing some form of "singular" "unity". Its "singularity" as int he opposite of a blackhole, as in some font of infinitely flowing energy/matter. This statement, sums up his entire straw-man arguement: #1 - Science and Technology are diverging, not converging. The entire idea of the singularity is that everything is coming together and one day we'll be Done. The thing behind behind singularity is simple. The sum of human technology and understanding of the universe is increasing. The rate at which that increase is happening, is ITSELF increasing. Anyone who has passed highschool algebra realizes what you have here describes an exponential curve. The result of which is not that you reach some number and then stop. Its that you start reaching infinitely high numbers... Singularity does not describe some utopia. It simply states that we are approaching some kind of world where the rate at which technological advance is so fast, that "state-of-the-art" will change in MOMENTS. It used to be state of the art moved in thousands of years(stone/bronze/iron), 50 years ago it was changing in the course of a decade. Its already arguably under a year now. |
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