Exploring the 'Singularity'

http://www.kurzweilai.net/meme/frame.html?main=memelist.html?m=1%23584 ^ | James John Bell

[sourcery]

From the article sidebar:

Keys to Understanding the Singularity

Singularity is the postulated point in our future when human evolutionary development?powered by such developments as nanotechnology, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence?accelerates enormously so that nothing beyond that time can reliably be conceived. Typical developments include the merging of man and machine (cybernetic organisms?or cyborgs) and accelerated technology beyond our ability to control.

Nanotechnology is the development and use of devices that have a size of only a few nanometers, including building and manipulating complex structures on an atomic scale. As we approach the Singularity, nanodevices will be able to replicate themselves like living matter.

Biorobotics is the merging of living organisms with technologies. At a simple level, this includes implanting chips encoded with health or security information. Biorobotics also encompasses the development of cyborgs that seamlessly blend living tissue with mechanical devices.

Cloning is the growing of genetically identical cells, eliminating the natural role of human biology and bringing us closer to the Singularity.

Extropians await the Singularity, seeking to overcome human limits, live indefinitely long, and become more intelligent through technology. Related groups include transhumanists and posthumanists.

Neo-Luddites oppose the impending Singularity by raising questions about moral and ethical aspects of modern technology and the threat it may pose to humanity.

The Singularity

The Futurist

Technological progress grows exponentially and reaches infinity in finite time (click image for larger view)

Technological progress goes through four stages: new capability, integration, technological limit, and decline as a new paradigm takes over. Each new capability represents a technological revolution that gradually gives rise to a new techno-economic paradigm, which guides entrepreneurs, innovators, investors, and consumers. Singularity pioneer Vernor Vinge argues that successive innovations will occur in progressively shorter time frames as each new technology increases in power and converges with others, as when advances in the life sciences are accelerated by increasing computer power. Ever-shortening time periods make the aggregate power curve "hyper-exponential," with the resulting waves of technological convergences eventually reaching the Singularity.

?James John Bell

[sourcery]

FYI

[Monty22]

See Kubrick/Spielberg's AI to see a possible glimpse at what we might be facing.

As soon as machines become self aware and able to produce offspring that are superior each generation, it'll become and out of control situation and humans will perish.

Maybe they'll have legends and religions about their creators. That's one part I liked about AI, David at the end is priceless to the ruling robots because he was a rare example of robot that lived with living humans.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Don't worry - there will always be somebody at the "switch".

[Fitzcarraldo]

Don't worry - there will always be somebody at the "switch".

I think this vision of the future is entertained by anarcho-futurists.

[FreeLibertarian]

Here is an article from Scientific American; Information in the Holographic Universe, that explores the relationship between Information and Black Holes (Singularities). Supposedly our entire Universe is encoded on the Event Horizon surrounding Black Holes.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa006&articleID=000AF072-4891-1F0A-97AE80A84189EEDF

[The Duke]

I don't know about any "Singularity", but I did just see Arnold Schwarzenegger walking naked down the road wearing a pair of sunglasses and carrying a shotgun!

[RightWhale]

machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence within a few decades

Maybe the machines will find a way to bring peace to the ME.

[tet68]

Skynet.

[Physicist]

Self-bump. Fast-forward the Singularity!

[DoctorMichael]

We're all Bozos on this bus.

Bump.

[tortoise]

Wow. An article that quotes half a dozen people I know quite well socially showing up on FreeRepublic. If the thread gets interesting, I'll ping these people with a URL to the thread to get their reaction.

[Physicist]

The article doesn't mention a technology that I believe will turn out to be crucial to the Singularity: the enhancement of human intelligence. This will happen in two ways: the chemical enhancement of the intelligence of living humans, and the genetic engineering of the humans yet to be born.

The latter is coming. The former is imminent.

[farmfriend]

the chemical enhancement of the intelligence of living humans

Didn't they try that back in the 60s? ;^)

[Physicist]

Do you know Vernor Vinge? I've met him; he has one of the most engaging and flexible minds I've had the pleasure to meet.

[Stefan Stackhouse]

Exponential trends for any phenomena rarely, if ever, continue unabated into infinity. Almost always, there is some limiting factor that eventually puts the breaks on the exponential acceleration.

[boris]

I wonder how all this technological miracle-making will carry on when the current generation of college graduates who cannot read, compute, or write coherently take over from us oldies.

I suppose in Japan or China.

--Boris

[freebilly]

Will I merge with Windows, and if so, will I crash...?

[Question_Assumptions]

Science Fiction is wrong more often than it is right, in part because most good science fiction is more about the time in which it is written than about the actual future. The original Star Trek series (many episodes of which were written by real science fiction authors like Harlan Ellison and Norman Spinrad instead of fanboys and girls) had episodes about racism, space hippies, doomsday machines, eugenics, World War 3, male/female relationships, robots replacing man, computers running amok and taking over, proxy wars, and other issues that reflected the anxieties of the 1960s. We didn't have a Eugenics War in the 1990s. We didn't launch an orbital nuclear weapons platform in the late 1960s. The predictions in science fiction novels are rarely better. In Jerry Pournelle's Co-Dominium, the Soviet Union never collapsed.

Nanotechnology? What will power those tiny machines? Biotechnology? We are having trouble determining if certain genes can predict susceptability to a cancer or disease and people are talking about genetic engineering designer children? Cloning will produce children that simply share the same genetic structure of the cloned person, not the full grown perfect copy that we see in science fiction movies. The poorly titled movie Parts: The Clonus Horror actually does a pretty good job of treating cloning in a plausible manner. Robotics? The state of the art is not nearly as impressive as what science fiction authors imagine. Virtual reality? The thing that everyone seems to forget is that it takes time to create all those virtual objects to pupulate the virtual world. Sure, it won't cost you $50,000 to buy the building materials to build your virtual house but you may still need several months to assemble it in your virtual world. I'm sorry but I don't see that singularity around the corner.