Talk:Singularity

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Liked Dragon's egg - nice hard SF. Susanspeak your mind 03:06, 24 October 2007 (EDT)

Have you read Quarantine? one of the weirder and more wonderful takes on the singularity idea. --Jeeves 03:17, 24 October 2007 (EDT)
No never have - on your recommendation though I will. Never read any Greg Eagan. Off to the big city book shop, hope I can find it & you're right;-) Susanspeak your mind
No Quarantine - got Schild's ladder £7.99 ($15?) it better be god  ;-) (see alsoUser_Talk:AmesG Susanspeak your mind 08:35, 24 October 2007 (EDT)

Contents

[edit] Three Major Singularity Schools

There are at least three very different definitions of "technological singularity" in common use. This article currently treats them all as the same concept. See http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools for definitions of the three different schools of thought --PeerInfinity (talk) 22:33, 23 November 2010 (UTC)

I like his "fourth" definition. That's pretty much what it's like. Scarlet A.pngpostate 09:10, 24 November 2010 (UTC)
I've paraphrased Yudkowsky's article into a section here. I'm not sure that then contradicts the previous section which talks about it in more general terms. It might annoy EY to combine them, but those ideas aren't distinct enough to treat entirely separately. Scarlet A.pngpostate 09:28, 24 November 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Interesting

worth reading

http://www.imminst.org/forum/topic/46197-essay-against-ai-singularity/

[edit] Blue Brain Project

Personally, I feel that the technological singularity will be reached by the end of this decade. I'm not going to use the argument of Moore's Law. It's true that anyone who believes in perpetually accelerating growth in a world with finite resources is either a madman or an economist. It's also one of my main grudges against economic growth as we know it, but that's a topic for another day. The wp:Blue Brain Project is an attempt to reverse-engineer the neocortex (or possibly the whole brain) and build an electronic version of it. At a TED conference in 2009, it was stated that the human brain could be built in 10 years. What took nature ~4 billion years will take humans less than twenty. Once we can create these robots as smart as humans, with the same neural construction with the main difference that one uses sodium ions and the other uses electrons in its wiring, it is hardly surprising that these robots will seek to "improve" themselves, which will increase their intellect more so. The world in 2022 is going to be very different than 2012. The Heidelberg Kid (talk) 01:21, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I wouldn't hold my breath on that one. Or maybe I would just to keep the fumes from the Kurzweil Kool-Aid from seeping into my own brain. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 01:40, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
But nanobots! Scarlet A.pngpathetic 01:59, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Lol. ħumanUser talk:Human 02:03, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
And if that fails, "But Moore's Law!" Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 02:22, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
The AI guys down the hall once mention a cat brain being done, using an ungodly amount of RAM on the order of 100TB or so. Human brain's along way off. TyAnnoy 02:34, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Even that didn't simulate individual neurons and synapses. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 02:37, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Now, why not? They already made great progress from 2005, when the first individual artificial neuron was made. They'll be able to make the artificial rat brain by 2014, and the artificial human brain by 2023. Now, why wouldn't this be possible? Man has been able to replicate nature quite well before, as you probably know from bioengineering. The Heidelberg Kid (talk) 02:41, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Bioengineering != CS. TyAnnoy 02:43, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
We are only just beginning to figure out how the human brain functions, let alone simulate the damn thing. AI is notorious for under-delivering on its promises. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 02:47, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
AI techies are notorious for over estimating what they actually know.  ;-) Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina 03:40, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Of course. But that's just the usual future projection fallacy or whatever it's actually called. The only way to say, with any degree of reasonable confidence, that we'll "have technology X by 2020" is to have the ability to do it now. You simply can't predict the future that well unless you get a million people to make different predictions and laud the one that happens to get it right as a visionary. Scarlet A.pngmoral 10:43, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Sorry, wrong word. I meant "biotechnology". The Heidelberg Kid (talk) 02:51, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
The non-scientist in me is dubious that we will *ever* hit this point, but if we do, it won't be soon. Technology takes too much time to develop. WE don't even know how we think - so any AI will either be limited or just different. But again, i just read about this today, and am trolling the site for things to talk about -- so mostly "what do I knwo".Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina 03:36, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Hkid - i'm curious. how can they make these "artificial brains" when we don't even know how the fucking brain works. we are just now getting glimpses of what makes sensations, thoughts are beyond our comprehension right now. We would have to actually understand what the folds are for, what the ratio of chemical to goo is, and why they are that way. We might be able to GROW an already "designed" brain, but we are a long way off from "making" a brain from scratch.Pink mowse.pngGodotGrow a vagina 03:39, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
I think we're more likely to achieve biological immortality before the singularity, and while I certainly think the former will be reached in my lifetime, I can only hope for the latter. Godot's right. Since consciousness is an emergent property, simply being able to imitate the components of the brain will do nothing for our ability to actually create a functioning mind. Picon small.pngAcer Blue 04:11, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
I just want to be a tech priest really. Without the stupid Omnissiah machine spirit BS. So that would make me more of a heretek really. TyAnnoy 04:15, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
A cyborg? Picon small.pngAcer Blue 04:18, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Yep. More of the Dread Magos Robertson than anything. TyAnnoy 04:22, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Has Blue been sniffing the glue in the bindings of those transhumanist books all this time? Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:19, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
I've never heard of transhumanism... though maybe Iain M. Banks' books would count. Picon small.pngLiquid Blue 04:26, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────We haz snarticle. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:27, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm, I suppose I'd subscribe to some kind of transhumanism, but more along the lines of funky induced genetics and mechanical implants type things. Picon small.pngAcer Blue 04:30, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Similar here. Singularity is pretty much BS though. TyAnnoy 04:31, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
I'll go out on a (titanium) limb here and say that that'll happen long before AI is ever perfected. Peter Monomorium antarcticum 04:34, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
Meh. Read the link to One-Half a Manifesto on this page. It's far more sane and level-headed than much of what comes out of the transhumanist/Singularitarian strain of thought. Nebuchadnezzar (talk) 04:48, 29 January 2012 (UTC)
I stopped reading when he argued "Someone will eventually prove X. Therefore X." (I'm not making that up. Search for "new Kant" for his actual wording.) Player 03 (talk) 04:01, 10 April 2015 (UTC)

Regarding the whole "we don't know how the brain works, how the hell are we supposed to re-make it" thing, I'd like to say a lot of things (e.g., many medicines) are made by humans and work without very much understanding exactly how they work.
Regarding the fact that consciousness is emergent, I can easily write a simple program in pseudocode to test this:

[edit] Memory

  • Definition:conscious = "aware of what is going on around you"

[edit] Input

  • "Are you conscious?" }= I

[edit] Processing and Output

  • IF I = "Are you conscious", proceed to Algorithm X

[edit] Algorithm X

  • IF Self is Definition:conscious, reply YES }= A
  • IF ~A, reply NO

Basically, we include the definition of being conscious in the AI's memory, ask the AI if it is conscious, and program it so it will reply "yes" iff (if and only if) it is conscious, and reply "no" otherwise. Kind of like what would happen if you were to ask a human "are you conscious?" If we get a "yes", the person's conscious, unless we want to go into the wild world of solipsism. The Heidelberg Kid (talk) 17:22, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

That's all well and good but for two things. The first is the obvious one -- how do you write a test for self-awareness to begin with? Second, your argument is essentially assuming, if not a miracle, then at least a major strike of dumb luck. It could happen, but it's not guaranteed to, so it's not likely to be worth considering. (Don't forget, drug discovery is a rather scattershot business, and as a general rule, has a lot more people working on it at any given time than AI work does.) Under those circumstances, any attempt to make a prediction about strong AI (to say nothing of the Singularity) is at best meaningless, at worst delusional. EVDebs (talk) 19:31, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

[edit] Sounds like nonsense to me

"A singularity has no dimensions because it contains all dimensions, and it also contains all the laws of physics"

[edit] Arguments?

The article is basically pure snarl. What I'm missing is a reason why. For example:

This posits that the singularity is driven by a feedback cycle between intelligence enhancing technology and intelligence itself. As Yudkowsky (who endorses this view) "What would humans with brain-computer interfaces do with their augmented intelligence? One good bet is that they’d design the next generation of brain-computer interfaces." When this feedback loop of technology and intelligence begins to increase rapidly, the singularity is upon us.

This seems pretty solid. Assuming people use technology to enhance their intelligence, that enhanced intelligence will be better at improving its intelligence. So there's one plausible scenario. Strong AI is another, resulting in a similar feedback cycle, if such an AI is able to program another AI.

"Critics, however, believe that humans will never be able to invent a machine that will match human intelligence, let alone exceed it." <- This is the only argument given against a singularity scenario in general (as opposed to short time frames), which however sounds like a "Souls are magic"-argument to me. IF we are at the bottom physical systems and consciousness/intelligence is a result of physical processes (as I think most, if not all, of us are pretty sure of), how could anyone argue that we will never be able to match our own intelligence with technology, given that we KNOW that physical systems are capable of intelligent behaviour?

Of course people like Kurzweil are hard to take seriously with their narrow time estimates; but WHEN the singularity comes, is a different question than IF it comes, or if it is plausible that it comes.

Point is: Given that this is rational wiki it's pretty absurd to see that this article consists mostly of bashing of the idea without any attempt at arguing against it. The idea is at the very least not OBVIOUSLY wrong, so I'd suggest either giving (at least ANY, at best SOLID) arguments why the idea is bullshit or taking on a more neutral stance. — Unsigned, by: 178.7.248.190 / talk / contribs

I know I'm just another anon editor, but really I came to this talk page to try and express thoughts pretty similar to the above. There's almost nothing but ridicule and argument from absurdity. I come to the rationalwiki looking for arguments, or at least links to sources which carefully address the issues. Congratulatory ad hominem bashing of ideas without using arguments of substance does not help me find information which may change my mind. I encourage RW editors who think the main idea of singularity is poor to rewrite this article and focus on real issues with the arguments presented for it, not laughing of those who don't agree with the consensus. You'll convince more that way if you're right, and maybe you'll find things are less clear-cut in mid-long term future predictions.--171.96.240.105 (talk) 18:51, 8 February 2014 (UTC)
The basic issue (as the article says) is that there's no actual reason to think that such a feedback loop will continue forever. Real-world design and development doesn't proceed along linear curves associated with the number of researchers or their intelligence (even if intelligence was quantifiable, which it is not.) Therefore, it's possible to hit a point where the best AI or brain-computer interface is incapable of further rapid, dramatic improvements to its capabilities -- further directions for research might exist in that situation, but could, for instance, require years, decades, or centuries of practical research and refinement of industrial techniques that are outside the capability of the AI to simulate. It's entirely possible for computer science to hit a dead end or a plateau -- for our best computers to hit a point where we can't really improve them using our current understanding of physics, and where the best possible AIs those computers can run (after those AIs have improved themselves to their absolute limits) are unable to get our understanding of physics to the necessary level except in a very long timeframe, possibly because, say, further physics research in the proper directions requires materials or natural phenomena we cannot easily obtain. If the research necessary to produce the next-gen computers that can run next-gen AIs requires studying a type of quasar of which the closest example is a thousand light-years away up-close, whelp, your successively-tighter singularity-loops just hit at least a thousand-year delay (I guess two thousand, if you want to get the information back here!)
Real-world technological advancement isn't like playing Civilization -- often it takes broad changes to the infrastructure of your entire society to even begin to investigate possible improvements on current technology; it's not necessarily enough to have a billion supergeniuses in a box, no matter how smart. Which isn't to say that actual human-like or transhuman AIs won't cause dramatic changes to society and be able to improve research in all sorts of ways, of course, but the idea that the degree of iterative self-improvements necessary for the singularity are possible is purely speculative. It's possible that our first AIs will improve themselves a bit, then halt and require entirely new physical forms of computing in order to go any further, which they can't get without practical research rather than just simulations and thinking.
More than that, though, I think the real focus of this article is about the meaning people attach to the Singularity -- the comparison to the Rapture, I think, is particularly apt. If you challenge someone who considers themselves a rationalist about their predictions for the future of contact with alien life, or the future of economics, or the future of cars or transportation or the internet, they'll generally take it in stride; but in my experience, there are a lot of people committed to the idea of the Singularity to the extent where challenging it is taken as a personal insult. And I think that's because, as the article implies, to many of them it is their way of envisioning a future where they can avoid death, or a way of picturing a dramatic, world-shaking, and most of all imminent future that will hit within their lifetime and render all their mistakes and flaws and problems up until now moot. None of which is to say that the Singularity is impossible (the article, while snarky, doesn't go that far) -- it doesn't violate any physical laws, and the only really dramatic leap of faith it requires is perhaps a somewhat questionable handwave about the nature of research and scientific progress -- but at the same time, at the moment it's important to recognize that everything about the Singularity amounts to purely speculative musings without any real backing to them beyond "it'd totally be cool if we could develop an AI that could exponentially improve itself forever, right?" --Aquillion (talk) 05:29, 17 August 2014 (UTC)
"Real-world design and development doesn't proceed along linear curves associated with the number of researchers or their intelligence." Indeed, it's often other factors that determine the amount of time taken. But then again, it's not like smart people are all that distant from stupid people, so perhaps you wouldn't expect to see a huge difference. If you really wanted to see a difference, use non-humans as your designers. The other great apes are pretty close to us, evolutionarily speaking, but none of them would be a productive researcher.
I know we don't have a way to measure actual intelligence, but no matter how you look at it, humans are reliably smarter than any other animal.
I guess what I'm saying is, the whole "endless exponential self-improvement" thing isn't even necessary. If a computer got as far ahead of us as we are ahead of chimpanzees, that would be enough to take over the world. Player 03 (talk) 02:35, 8 April 2015 (UTC)

[edit] Arguing backwards

The concept is not necessarily wrong, but unlikely to be more than partially right.

Go back 50 years, and much of what is now arould could be understood ('technology advances but emails ... something like a personal telegram service in your home ... hot Venus - weird, but if you say so... websites... something like amateur radio, but involving text and pictures...' etc)

150 years ago and some of present technology would be understood ('a car is like a steam engine, but uses petrol and an exhaust pipe rather than coal and a funnel...) but 'transmission at a distance' would be difficult to explain.

Go back 500 years and much would be inexplicable.

'Most people' would accept that the same will apply for future equivalents (but what is invented is unlikely to be more hostile than 'contrary comptuers' and having a slow puncture on Mars). 82.44.143.26 (talk) 14:35, 2 May 2014 (UTC)

[edit] Black Swan

One of the main problems I have with the Singularity is that such an event is, by nature, extremely rare and unpredictable. I'll be honest here, I'm not willing to rule it out completely, but I think the pseudoreligious overtones some proponents give it are kind of stupid. Optimusjamie (talk) 10:37, 1 December 2014 (UTC)

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