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People spend so much time talking about "the singularity" but billions of tiny dumb things seems much more like a danger.
by daxfohl 10y ago
People spend so much time talking about "the singularity" but billions of tiny dumb things seems much more like a danger.
- rzzzt 10y agoThe tinier, the worse: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_goo
- daledavies 10y agoThat's pretty scary. We spend a lot of time talking about AI taking over (like in the Terminator films), but the grey goo scenario seems much more realistic!
- T0T0R0 10y agoSo, the T-1000 was not an apparatus made of grey goo?
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoI'm not particularly worried about grey goo. Biology is already really good at that particular niche, and is adaptive to boot.
- stephengillie 10y agoThe Internet of Tiny Dumb Things.
- T0T0R0 10y agoThat math term, "singularity", re-appropriated as a technology hype buzz word, is rooted in a fundamental concept, though, and used to have a specific meaning: unpredictability. In calculus, when you try to graph a function, and a curve forms a harsh sweep into a vertical line, up or down, if the domain of X is time, a vertical line indicates multiple events happening simultaneously, and we can no longer define the equation as a function, because its results are not predictable. With a singularity, given a particular input (a moment in time), multiple values are possible. In terms of Wired Magazine Kurzweil hype, it means multiple novel inventions are being introduced simultaneously (if you were making a graph of inventions over time), and so, because 2 or more new things are happening at the same time, it becomes very hard to predict how people will try to use them, all at once.