Posted on 03/29/2002 1:08:55 AM PST by sarcasm
Already, Star Trek is looking primitive. Why would anyone bother going to as much work as they seem to put into doing everything. There will be systems that surpass anything that could be coordinated manually, but for overall strategic direction - in terms of the human economy - machines won't be able to function better than us because they are not us. Their interests will diverge.
I saw a scientist on The Outer Limits whose body was taken over by nano-robots and believe me, it was not a pretty sight! I don't think he was ever able to get another date following that episode.
I'll go on record as being the first person to chant "SAY NO NO TO NANO!"
It mentioned the "singularity" as a small part of the plot. Basically, people could travel forward in time(but not backward, and they couldn't be very precise about when they came out of their "bobble") and some travellers would bump into eachother and look for eachother as they jumped forward. Nobody knew how the singularity happenned, they were just jumping forward, and one time they found that all of humanity had gone. As if they were suddenly beamed out. Coffee cups half-full, cigarette ash in the trays as if someone had just left them burning, etc...
When I saw the word singularity in the post title, I thought about the novel, but didn't know it was talking about that.
Personally, I think that machine intelligence and advanced nanotech are alot farther away than 2020. There will be space pioneers and near-immortality for a long time before we have to deal with such issues.
What passes for intelligence in machines is really just emulation. Someone still has to do the analysis and program decision process into the machine.
Motors are made to be extremely small, but they are the simplest of motors, and they are still not small enough, for instance, to fit through the tip of a capillary in a human. You need something alot more sophisticated than a motor to repair cells. And there are physical limits. The machine has to be made of molecules, and to be a sophisticated machine, it has to have many complex molecules. How will it get inside a cell if it is larger than a cell? Biochemistry offers more hope along those lines.
Nanotech and AI are neat ideas, but for now they are strictly the stuff of sci-fi novels and open-ended research grants.
Perhaps there will be a merging of all humanity with all computers into a vast global brain.To some extent the INTERNET is that, already. To an extent. But it has been pointed out that the scarce resource that technology
has been driving to tap is the attention of people. Perhaps humans will retain control ofradio,
TV,
video games,
INTERNET
--and high speed printing before that
the "oh en slash oh eff eff" switch. (ON/OFF) Nothing else matters . . .
Plus the issue is not intellegence, since it all depends on what you use to measure it. My Excel spreadsheet is more intelligent than me if you use computational ability as the measure. But make the measure consciousness and you hit a barrier that may not be overcome. Computers may be able to beat a grand master in chess - not by thinking BTW but in punching numbers- but we can still pull the plug.
It's dangerous to make analogies between computers and any other human tool. Computers are the first man-made entity capable of storing (certain kinds of) information processing ability in a flexible and reproducible form. While the possibility of future artificial sentiences, functionally indistinguishable from human, cannot be ruled out, the evidence is still dubious that a program could ever equal the ability of its designers to assess and respond to unanticipated environmental changes -- as good a shorthand definition of the function of intelligence as I can produce before my second cup of coffee.
I should note that some august minds, Douglas Hofstadter among them, disagree with me, and feel it's only a matter of time.
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Teilhard's attempts to combine Christian thought with modern science and traditional philosophy aroused widespread interest and controversy when his writings were published in the 1950s. Teilhard aimed at a metaphysic of evolution, holding that it was a process converging toward a final unity that he called the Omega point. He attempted to show that what is of permanent value in traditional philosophical thought can be maintained and even integrated with a modern scientific outlook if one accepts that the tendencies of material things are directed, either wholly or in part, beyond the things themselves toward the production of higher, more complex, more perfectly unified beings. Teilhard regarded basic trends in matter--gravitation, inertia, electromagnetism, and so on--as being ordered toward the production of progressively more complex types of aggregate. This process led to the increasingly complex entities of atoms, molecules, cells, and organisms, until finally the human body evolved, with a nervous system sufficiently sophisticated to permit rational reflection, self-awareness, and moral responsibility. While some evolutionists regard man simply as a prolongation of the Pliocene fauna--an animal more successful than the rat or the elephant--Teilhard argued that the appearance of man brought an added dimension into the world. This he defines as the birth of reflection: animals know, but man knows that he knows; he has "knowledge to the square."
Where and how would the evidence first appear?
Currently human motivations are driving the process of wiring the world's computers together and increasing computer power.
What would be the first indication that computers are beginning to operate in their own self-interest (and against human interest)?
Ummm, we are in NO danger of that, so long as the majority of computers are running MicroSloth Windoze.
Why choose between singularity and individuality? What if the singularity is the result of individual expression? What if the singularity doesn't entail humans ceding authority to machines, but humans gaining abilities that enable them to do what only machines can do now?
Personally, I've never seen machines as being in opposition to human nature. I see technology as an expression and extension of those essential properties that sets man above the rest of nature. We are animals, yes, but that's not what's great about mankind; the world is full of mere animals. Our technology is our essential selves.
I agree, that's the way I view it as well.
If the singularity is possible at all, it is probably unavoidable as well. I look forward to it to tell you the truth. Some predictions have it happening as soon as 30 years from now. I'll be 66 then. Maybe I'll live long enough to have my mind uploaded or stored to disk before I die, or at least be able to take advantage of the advances in nano and medical tech to live much longer.
The thing with the singularity, because of the effects of doubling computer speed, most of advances will happen in the last 12 to 18 months preceding the event. You wouldn't be able to stand off 2 years previous and say- Hmmm singularity is almost here. Before the last doubling of processor speed, you would effectively be only halfway to the event, even though it is only a year away. I find this to be an interesting effect. It almost guarantees that the event will be a real "showstopper" because of the bang with which it arrives.
You might already know this, so I'll put it out there for those who might want to read more- A guy named Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote a piece called "Staring Into the Singularity". It's pretty interesting. In his way of thinking (and in that of many singularity enthusiasts) the Singularity should be the overriding goal for all humanity to work towards. For when we reach the post singularity world, all human suffering will be erased forever. No more death. No more pain. No more hunger. Man will throw off the shackles of his body and become as gods in the universe. It sounds crazy until you look at those graphs that plot the advancement of processing speed. At one point in the not too distant future- it just shoots right off the page; straight up into an unknowable place.
I also like to toy with the idea that only those of us who ever knew life before the computer will truly appreciate the singularity. Young people today have never known life without computer games, vcr's and, increasingly, the internet. For the coming generation, the transition won't even be noticed. It'll be marketed to them and they'll buy it and stick it into the pockets of their baggy pants or whatever they're wearing at that point. They'll get the interface surgically implanted in their brain because that's what the latest fashion models on the catwalks were doing. They'll stare at us crazy people with a stupid kind of wonder as we're trying to convince them that humans haven't always been this way- that just a few years ago, there wasn't even television... Ah, the future. It's almost here. Free Beer Tomorrow.
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