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And there's also a small minority of people like me who think that Kurzweil is mostly a crackpot who gave the technological singularity a bad name because of hi

by Iv 9y ago

And there's also a small minority of people like me who think that Kurzweil is mostly a crackpot who gave the technological singularity a bad name because of his baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts.

tomrod 9y ago
I know people who have moved Kurzweil's claims far beyond the pseudo-religious. Check out the Mormon Transhumanist Association sometime.
carsongross 9y ago
I don't think that that minority is all that small.
mvindahl 9y ago
We're also some who regard the whole concept of "the Singularity" as being a quasi-religious crackpot theory no matter how you slice it. Mind you, it's a powerful meme. Religious tradition abounds with references to some future event that will forcibly clean up the mess and propel us back to Eden. Some of the most prominent -isms of the 20th century subscribed to similar ideas. I guess our brains are a willing host to that kind of stuff. On top of that, the technological version of the end-of-history cult has the added attraction of whispering into our ears that maybe we .. as programmers and masters of the machine .. may just be able place ourselves on the right side of history and become immortal citizens in future tech utopia. A pantheon of gods, for all practical purposes. That's a seducing idea.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  Some aspect of the singularity is kind of undeniable. There's some information thing that's happening right now, and it's growing exponentially, and it just looks like it (for all intents and purposes) asymptotes vertical at some point, approximately 20 years from now. What actually happens at that point, I think that's up for debate. Are we going to become immortal? Probably not. Are we going to have AIs who are better at everything than expert humans? Probably not. But I think it's strange if someone denies that it's even happening. Just look at the amount of information that's flowing around, by any metric. It's exponential, and you can fit the curve and plot where it goes vertical. If we were talking about physical processes, I'd understand the skepticism. Maybe that exponential levels off. But I don't see why there is any physical limitation on how much information can flow. Or at least: if we hit that wall, things will be VERY different.
  - scythe 9y ago
    Exponential functions do not have singularities. There would have to be some additional property of the curve in order to conclude the presence of a singularity.
    - yorwba 9y ago
      I agree that "the Singularity" is not a singularity in the mathematical sense of divergence, but it is a singularity in the sense of a singular (i.e. special or unique) event. (If it happens at all, that is.)
      - kobeya 9y ago
        How? Look twenty years out and it appears vertical. But 10 years from now it will look much flatter, and what's then 20 years out (30 years from today) will look vertical. The grass is always greener 20 years in the future.
        yorwba 9y ago
        As I understand it, "the Singularity" refers to the point in time where AGI becomes better at improving itself than the humans that created it. Then the existing exponential growth gets replaced by another exponential, but with stronger feedback. It's the difference between a differential equation like x' = x and x' = 10x . In either case you can say "meh, if you normalize on today's value, the increase in 10 years is just a constant multiple", but the transition from one phase to the other will still be noticable, even though things won't "go vertical".
  - cookingrobot 9y ago
    A minor point- but exponential curves never actually asymptote or go vertical, they just keep getting closer to vertical forever. But with a big enough level of growth it might as well be vertical.
    - mvindahl 9y ago
- Iv 9y ago
  I don't come from a protestant country, "the end is nigh" does not really ring a bell in catholic countries. The technological singularity, originally, comes from a very practical observation by Vernor Vinge, who was explaining that as a SF author, once humanity reaches the point where it can make intelligent machines that improve themselves, he hits a "horizon event" that he is not intellectually equipped to look beyond. I have a hard time finding a good counterargument to it: the emergence of self-improving AIs of human or super-human capabilities will be an extremely strong and fast change in human progress. That much is true. So yes, the hopes one can place in it look similar to the hopes of the religious eschatologists, but using this similarity to reject the argument is just an association fallacy.
  - mvindahl 9y ago
    Going a bit off topic here but your remarks on religion makes me curious. I'm from a firmly -- albeit lazily -- protestant country and don't describe myself as religious in any meaningful sense, but still an interesting subject. My reference to religious "singularities" was to the apocalypse, or however you want to name it. The End of Days. The Second Coming. Stuff like that. I thought these ideas played a similar role in all branches of Christianity, although ignored by most people for most of the time. Is Catholicism and Protestantism so different in that regard? More on topic, I see the evolution of (better) AI as a logical extension to the computer revolution, and I see the computer revolution as equivalent in scope to the industrial revolution. So I'm not saying it's a small deal. I just don't believe a whole lot in self-improving AI as a concept all that different from what has been going on in, say, processor design, for decades, and I certainly don't believe in the idea of a runaway, self-improving AI. To become rapidly and exponentially more intelligent, it would have to either work smarter or work harder (to use an overused phrase). Working smarter would imply that if you arranged your CPU instructions in increasingly clever ways, you could extract exponentially rising performance from your programs. That's not how I remember the assembler programming that I did as a kid; you could be clever but there were some pretty hard limits. The strategy of working harder, on the other hand, would imply that someone would be willing to supply exponentially rising amounts of energy. Again, even if some Zuckerberg or some shady government agency would be willing to play this game, you'd quickly run into hard limits. So yeah, AI is not the first game changing phenomenon in the history of humankind but it will change stuff. Like did bronze, railroads, or nukes.
patta54 9y ago
I kind of feel the same way. I read "Age of Spiritual Machines" 15 years ago and thought it was interesting. But now I don't believe most of what he says or predicts. Some of the stuff will come true, but we won't be Matrix-like entities. I also don't like how he downplays (or completely neglects) social backpressure to technology adoption. Edit: His health regimen is also completely ridiculous. Edit 2: He actually sells his pill buffet: http://www.rayandterry.com/ http://www.rayandterry.com/
mrep 9y ago
Can't we just get rid of the whole singularity term altogether and just realize it is standard exponential growth that people are marking points on a logarithmic graph as the "singularity"?
kobeya 9y ago
> baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts I'm not a fan of Kurzweil, but isn't this really one of his claims with the most data behind it? His presentations on exponential trends is always accompanied with endless citations of data points that went into it. He has (or had prior to Google?) a research team whose job was to find this data.
- Iv 9y ago
  Just go at page 17 http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1.pdf http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1.... and see the kind of bogus things he puts together to fit his narrative of accelerating shifts. He puts no paradigm shift between the apparition of city states the invention of the printing press but he separates the inventions of computers and the invention of personal computers as two paradigm shifts. I did not check all the sources he uses in the graph page 19 but I suspect the same bias: we ascribe more importance to events closer to us than to events further in the past.
  - kobeya 9y ago
    In the context of information technology that's perhaps somewhat accurate though, right? City states centralized information into religious and political power structures. That pretty much stayed the same until the invention of the printing press. Maybe you could add the invention of double entry accounting and the banking industry it created, which allowed cooperation between disparate city states. But I'm not sure what else might be an epoch in between.
    - Iv 9y ago
      Gee, I don't know... Paper? Books? Libraries? Big empires with a uniform language? Roads networks? Trade routes? Accurate copying of books? Schools? University? Logic?

by Iv 9y ago

tomrod 9y ago

I know people who have moved Kurzweil's claims far beyond the pseudo-religious. Check out the Mormon Transhumanist Association sometime.

carsongross 9y ago

I don't think that that minority is all that small.

mvindahl 9y ago

We're also some who regard the whole concept of "the Singularity" as being a quasi-religious crackpot theory no matter how you slice it. Mind you, it's a powerful meme. Religious tradition abounds with references to some future event that will forcibly clean up the mess and propel us back to Eden. Some of the most prominent -isms of the 20th century subscribed to similar ideas. I guess our brains are a willing host to that kind of stuff. On top of that, the technological version of the end-of-history cult has the added attraction of whispering into our ears that maybe we .. as programmers and masters of the machine .. may just be able place ourselves on the right side of history and become immortal citizens in future tech utopia. A pantheon of gods, for all practical purposes. That's a seducing idea.

erikpukinskis 9y ago
Some aspect of the singularity is kind of undeniable. There's some information thing that's happening right now, and it's growing exponentially, and it just looks like it (for all intents and purposes) asymptotes vertical at some point, approximately 20 years from now. What actually happens at that point, I think that's up for debate. Are we going to become immortal? Probably not. Are we going to have AIs who are better at everything than expert humans? Probably not. But I think it's strange if someone denies that it's even happening. Just look at the amount of information that's flowing around, by any metric. It's exponential, and you can fit the curve and plot where it goes vertical. If we were talking about physical processes, I'd understand the skepticism. Maybe that exponential levels off. But I don't see why there is any physical limitation on how much information can flow. Or at least: if we hit that wall, things will be VERY different.
- scythe 9y ago
  Exponential functions do not have singularities. There would have to be some additional property of the curve in order to conclude the presence of a singularity.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    I agree that "the Singularity" is not a singularity in the mathematical sense of divergence, but it is a singularity in the sense of a singular (i.e. special or unique) event. (If it happens at all, that is.)
    - kobeya 9y ago
      How? Look twenty years out and it appears vertical. But 10 years from now it will look much flatter, and what's then 20 years out (30 years from today) will look vertical. The grass is always greener 20 years in the future.
      - yorwba 9y ago
        As I understand it, "the Singularity" refers to the point in time where AGI becomes better at improving itself than the humans that created it. Then the existing exponential growth gets replaced by another exponential, but with stronger feedback. It's the difference between a differential equation like x' = x and x' = 10x . In either case you can say "meh, if you normalize on today's value, the increase in 10 years is just a constant multiple", but the transition from one phase to the other will still be noticable, even though things won't "go vertical".
- cookingrobot 9y ago
  A minor point- but exponential curves never actually asymptote or go vertical, they just keep getting closer to vertical forever. But with a big enough level of growth it might as well be vertical.
  - mvindahl 9y ago
Iv 9y ago
I don't come from a protestant country, "the end is nigh" does not really ring a bell in catholic countries. The technological singularity, originally, comes from a very practical observation by Vernor Vinge, who was explaining that as a SF author, once humanity reaches the point where it can make intelligent machines that improve themselves, he hits a "horizon event" that he is not intellectually equipped to look beyond. I have a hard time finding a good counterargument to it: the emergence of self-improving AIs of human or super-human capabilities will be an extremely strong and fast change in human progress. That much is true. So yes, the hopes one can place in it look similar to the hopes of the religious eschatologists, but using this similarity to reject the argument is just an association fallacy.
- mvindahl 9y ago
  Going a bit off topic here but your remarks on religion makes me curious. I'm from a firmly -- albeit lazily -- protestant country and don't describe myself as religious in any meaningful sense, but still an interesting subject. My reference to religious "singularities" was to the apocalypse, or however you want to name it. The End of Days. The Second Coming. Stuff like that. I thought these ideas played a similar role in all branches of Christianity, although ignored by most people for most of the time. Is Catholicism and Protestantism so different in that regard? More on topic, I see the evolution of (better) AI as a logical extension to the computer revolution, and I see the computer revolution as equivalent in scope to the industrial revolution. So I'm not saying it's a small deal. I just don't believe a whole lot in self-improving AI as a concept all that different from what has been going on in, say, processor design, for decades, and I certainly don't believe in the idea of a runaway, self-improving AI. To become rapidly and exponentially more intelligent, it would have to either work smarter or work harder (to use an overused phrase). Working smarter would imply that if you arranged your CPU instructions in increasingly clever ways, you could extract exponentially rising performance from your programs. That's not how I remember the assembler programming that I did as a kid; you could be clever but there were some pretty hard limits. The strategy of working harder, on the other hand, would imply that someone would be willing to supply exponentially rising amounts of energy. Again, even if some Zuckerberg or some shady government agency would be willing to play this game, you'd quickly run into hard limits. So yeah, AI is not the first game changing phenomenon in the history of humankind but it will change stuff. Like did bronze, railroads, or nukes.

patta54 9y ago

I kind of feel the same way. I read "Age of Spiritual Machines" 15 years ago and thought it was interesting. But now I don't believe most of what he says or predicts. Some of the stuff will come true, but we won't be Matrix-like entities. I also don't like how he downplays (or completely neglects) social backpressure to technology adoption. Edit: His health regimen is also completely ridiculous. Edit 2: He actually sells his pill buffet: http://www.rayandterry.com/ http://www.rayandterry.com/

mrep 9y ago

Can't we just get rid of the whole singularity term altogether and just realize it is standard exponential growth that people are marking points on a logarithmic graph as the "singularity"?

kobeya 9y ago

> baseless claims on exponential acceleration of paradigm shifts I'm not a fan of Kurzweil, but isn't this really one of his claims with the most data behind it? His presentations on exponential trends is always accompanied with endless citations of data points that went into it. He has (or had prior to Google?) a research team whose job was to find this data.

Iv 9y ago
Just go at page 17 http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1.pdf http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/SingularityisNear_Chapter1.... and see the kind of bogus things he puts together to fit his narrative of accelerating shifts. He puts no paradigm shift between the apparition of city states the invention of the printing press but he separates the inventions of computers and the invention of personal computers as two paradigm shifts. I did not check all the sources he uses in the graph page 19 but I suspect the same bias: we ascribe more importance to events closer to us than to events further in the past.
- kobeya 9y ago
  In the context of information technology that's perhaps somewhat accurate though, right? City states centralized information into religious and political power structures. That pretty much stayed the same until the invention of the printing press. Maybe you could add the invention of double entry accounting and the banking industry it created, which allowed cooperation between disparate city states. But I'm not sure what else might be an epoch in between.
  - Iv 9y ago
    Gee, I don't know... Paper? Books? Libraries? Big empires with a uniform language? Roads networks? Trade routes? Accurate copying of books? Schools? University? Logic?