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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 power

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
    True. Making any exponential curve look like a hockey stick is mostly a matter of picking the scale. I could probably create a chart showing how the population of the earth went vertical during the reign of the Caesars. Of course, a logarithmic plot solves that issue.
- Lorkki 9y ago
  It seems much more likely to me that we're somewhere in the middle of an S-curve, before the limiting factors have kicked in. In terms of processing power, it's already happened to performance per thread, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that there's a plateau to total throughput as well. Even then, we're undoubtedly going to see some really amazing stuff come out of machine learning in the decades to come, just maybe not the beginning of Ragnarok.
  - erikpukinskis 9y ago
    An S-curve still goes "vertical" at some point. That's the idea: that some aspect of reality will be qualitatively weirder when information goes vertical-ish.
- mvindahl 9y ago
  My main problem with the predictive power of exponential curves is externalities, usually some tradeoff or some limit to resources. Try as I might, I probably couldn't put it better than it's done in this talk: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm
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.

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
  True. Making any exponential curve look like a hockey stick is mostly a matter of picking the scale. I could probably create a chart showing how the population of the earth went vertical during the reign of the Caesars. Of course, a logarithmic plot solves that issue.
Lorkki 9y ago
It seems much more likely to me that we're somewhere in the middle of an S-curve, before the limiting factors have kicked in. In terms of processing power, it's already happened to performance per thread, and it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume that there's a plateau to total throughput as well. Even then, we're undoubtedly going to see some really amazing stuff come out of machine learning in the decades to come, just maybe not the beginning of Ragnarok.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago
  An S-curve still goes "vertical" at some point. That's the idea: that some aspect of reality will be qualitatively weirder when information goes vertical-ish.
mvindahl 9y ago
My main problem with the predictive power of exponential curves is externalities, usually some tradeoff or some limit to resources. Try as I might, I probably couldn't put it better than it's done in this talk: http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm http://idlewords.com/talks/web_design_first_100_years.htm

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.