16 ms·

Programming for a culture approaching singularity

30 points by rsaarelm 16y ago

phreeza 16y ago
The unix philosophy is along these lines i think, making small tools that do one thing well, and text input/output. Perhaps its time for an update of this for the 21st century.
- kiba 16y ago
  I recall the GNU project being somewhat ambitious about these sort of stuff. If the rest of the world were rebuilt to be like emacs(uniformly customizable, extensible, and self documenting), I'll go totally bonkers. Suddenly, my playground is no longer limited to emacs, but the entire computing environment. However, this kind of code idealism is unfortunately killed by good enough and the desire of the FSF of going into politics. That's what freedom to me is like. It's not something nebulous like fighting evil developers or something. It's a world in which users feel like a badass, and which everything is an extension of your mind. It's a crying shame that the free software world wasn't able to realize that kind of potential.
  - kmort 16y ago
    Do you feel that the Semantic Web concept now leads that charge?
    - ThomPete 16y ago
      The Semantic web isn't the solution IMHO. The problem with the semantic web is that it forces a narrative based on an ontological approach. But in my mind the real value in connecting everything is the connections themselves rather then their meaning which should never be settled. In other words the value of connecting everything is that it opens up for multiple interpretations, descriptions and clustering. We should look at data more like neurons than ontological items. I.e. absent of meaning without context.
    - kiba 16y ago
      I don't understand what the Semantic Web is about at all. It seem to be about imbuing means in links or something. It doesn't seem to be anything related to the feeling of being in emacs and using it.
  - sprout 16y ago
    'Good enough' is largely a political problem. I don't think the FSF would have gone into politics if it were possible to rewrite the world in the style of Emacs. That's a political goal, that's not a technical one. I think we're sort of in a pre-literate society in a lot of ways, and people (or whatever) will look back on this century as sort of like the beginnings of language. And like natural language, I think computer languages and their use are going to eventually have much more interesting political implications. Especially once the concept of IP dies and we start looking at code as a conversation.
    - kiba 16y ago
      That's a different use of the term politics you got there. I think FSF failed was due more to development methodology rather than the feasibility of the goal in itself. Take a look at emacs. Its release cycle is very long in between, survives forks, and generally being unpalatable to new users imitated by its keyboard configuration. It still lives. It still thrive. But it doesn't thrive as much as it should.
arethuza 16y ago
I don't think we are seeing any signs of approaching a singularity. However, it is clear we are going through a major technological step change as significant as printed books and mass transport. I just found this quote which I love: "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book
- bsaunder 16y ago
  What signs do you think you will see? I think we are hitting a new reality where people are having a hard time adding value. Over time, I think computers and robots will be able to automate and out perform most human tasks. Much effort is put on retraining people for new jobs. The problem is that there will come a point where no human will beat the automated systems and no amount of training will fix that. On the top end of the scale, we have brilliant people that are forced to accept low wage research jobs or jobs that have nothing to do with their specialty. Have you seen the diapers.com automated warehouse video? How long do you think it will take before every non-unionized retail chain has automated the restocking of their stores. How many net jobs do you think that will create? I'm not saying the "Singularity" is approaching. But I do wonder what the signs would be and if these are some of them.
  - kiba 16y ago
    Useful automation is going to lead to more wealth, which mean more free time for other stuff. However, there come a point that automation approach the point where further investment will yield diminishing marginal returns. People are going to automate so much. Just because you have a machine that produces 1,000,000 cokes in an hour doesn't mean you're going to make more money. What you will end up is a machine that actually cost a lot to maintain, and produce lot of cokes that will be thrown away due to the bottleneck in other parts of the production chain.
    - bsaunder 16y ago
qwzybug 16y ago
Anyone who thinks the technological singularity is a viable idea ought to listen to Bruce Sterling's Long Now talk, "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole". http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-you... The whole notion is really dreadfully implausible and poorly thought-through. A few computer-centric technologists take their hobby to be the most important thing in the world, as if the exponential growth of transistors on a chip or bits on the web are more important than the (stagnant) power grid, energy and food production, global war and peace, etc. Admittedly, that's not an uncommon phenomenon in these parts.
- sophacles 16y ago
  Tangential: The power grid is not that stagnant anymore. A bunch of upgrading is in the planning/early deployment phases right now, including: * PMUs * Dynamic, consumer-level, load response * Superconducting transmission lines * Distributed generation resources on distribution grids * large scale wind farms much more
- DennisP 16y ago
  Biology is making enormous strides as well. I could see that having an impact on energy and food production. Of course, that's driven in part by advances in computation, just like a lot of other technology. Plasma physics, for example, which could yet make a big difference for energy.
  - qwzybug 16y ago
    Sure, but that's not to discount the main point, which is that singularitarians arbitrarily privilege the importance of computational advancement over the real world. This is probably because computers are the easiest to draw the exponential advancement graph for (and because singularitarians hardly ever leave the basement). Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030. Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to wafers? Probably not. One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more metal at it. Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.
endergen 16y ago
Singularity talk is reminiscent of the early AI work, everyone thought they were on the verge of creating human level AI. Yeah, that didn't happen(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter). How's this any different? What makes you so confident it will suddenly happen now? That we have more data, that we are mucking around with our brains more? I'm with qwzybug, I echo his sentiment.
- DennisP 16y ago
  Nobody thinks it will suddenly happen now. They think that Moore's Law will continue for another fifty or seventy years, and that somewhere in there, computers or computer-human hybrids will start to be smarter than unenhanced humans. What happens after that, we're not smart enough right now to predict.

30 points by rsaarelm 16y ago

The unix philosophy is along these lines i think, making small tools that do one thing well, and text input/output. Perhaps its time for an update of this for the 21st century.

kiba 16y ago
I recall the GNU project being somewhat ambitious about these sort of stuff. If the rest of the world were rebuilt to be like emacs(uniformly customizable, extensible, and self documenting), I'll go totally bonkers. Suddenly, my playground is no longer limited to emacs, but the entire computing environment. However, this kind of code idealism is unfortunately killed by good enough and the desire of the FSF of going into politics. That's what freedom to me is like. It's not something nebulous like fighting evil developers or something. It's a world in which users feel like a badass, and which everything is an extension of your mind. It's a crying shame that the free software world wasn't able to realize that kind of potential.
- kmort 16y ago
  Do you feel that the Semantic Web concept now leads that charge?
  - ThomPete 16y ago
    The Semantic web isn't the solution IMHO. The problem with the semantic web is that it forces a narrative based on an ontological approach. But in my mind the real value in connecting everything is the connections themselves rather then their meaning which should never be settled. In other words the value of connecting everything is that it opens up for multiple interpretations, descriptions and clustering. We should look at data more like neurons than ontological items. I.e. absent of meaning without context.
  - kiba 16y ago
    I don't understand what the Semantic Web is about at all. It seem to be about imbuing means in links or something. It doesn't seem to be anything related to the feeling of being in emacs and using it.
- sprout 16y ago
  'Good enough' is largely a political problem. I don't think the FSF would have gone into politics if it were possible to rewrite the world in the style of Emacs. That's a political goal, that's not a technical one. I think we're sort of in a pre-literate society in a lot of ways, and people (or whatever) will look back on this century as sort of like the beginnings of language. And like natural language, I think computer languages and their use are going to eventually have much more interesting political implications. Especially once the concept of IP dies and we start looking at code as a conversation.
  - kiba 16y ago
    That's a different use of the term politics you got there. I think FSF failed was due more to development methodology rather than the feasibility of the goal in itself. Take a look at emacs. Its release cycle is very long in between, survives forks, and generally being unpalatable to new users imitated by its keyboard configuration. It still lives. It still thrive. But it doesn't thrive as much as it should.

arethuza 16y ago

I don't think we are seeing any signs of approaching a singularity. However, it is clear we are going through a major technological step change as significant as printed books and mass transport. I just found this quote which I love: "A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book

bsaunder 16y ago
What signs do you think you will see? I think we are hitting a new reality where people are having a hard time adding value. Over time, I think computers and robots will be able to automate and out perform most human tasks. Much effort is put on retraining people for new jobs. The problem is that there will come a point where no human will beat the automated systems and no amount of training will fix that. On the top end of the scale, we have brilliant people that are forced to accept low wage research jobs or jobs that have nothing to do with their specialty. Have you seen the diapers.com automated warehouse video? How long do you think it will take before every non-unionized retail chain has automated the restocking of their stores. How many net jobs do you think that will create? I'm not saying the "Singularity" is approaching. But I do wonder what the signs would be and if these are some of them.
- kiba 16y ago
  Useful automation is going to lead to more wealth, which mean more free time for other stuff. However, there come a point that automation approach the point where further investment will yield diminishing marginal returns. People are going to automate so much. Just because you have a machine that produces 1,000,000 cokes in an hour doesn't mean you're going to make more money. What you will end up is a machine that actually cost a lot to maintain, and produce lot of cokes that will be thrown away due to the bottleneck in other parts of the production chain.
  - bsaunder 16y ago

qwzybug 16y ago

Anyone who thinks the technological singularity is a viable idea ought to listen to Bruce Sterling's Long Now talk, "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole". http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-as-a-black-hole/ http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-you... The whole notion is really dreadfully implausible and poorly thought-through. A few computer-centric technologists take their hobby to be the most important thing in the world, as if the exponential growth of transistors on a chip or bits on the web are more important than the (stagnant) power grid, energy and food production, global war and peace, etc. Admittedly, that's not an uncommon phenomenon in these parts.

sophacles 16y ago
Tangential: The power grid is not that stagnant anymore. A bunch of upgrading is in the planning/early deployment phases right now, including: * PMUs * Dynamic, consumer-level, load response * Superconducting transmission lines * Distributed generation resources on distribution grids * large scale wind farms much more
DennisP 16y ago
Biology is making enormous strides as well. I could see that having an impact on energy and food production. Of course, that's driven in part by advances in computation, just like a lot of other technology. Plasma physics, for example, which could yet make a big difference for energy.
- qwzybug 16y ago
  Sure, but that's not to discount the main point, which is that singularitarians arbitrarily privilege the importance of computational advancement over the real world. This is probably because computers are the easiest to draw the exponential advancement graph for (and because singularitarians hardly ever leave the basement). Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030. Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to wafers? Probably not. One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more metal at it. Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.

endergen 16y ago

Singularity talk is reminiscent of the early AI work, everyone thought they were on the verge of creating human level AI. Yeah, that didn't happen(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter). How's this any different? What makes you so confident it will suddenly happen now? That we have more data, that we are mucking around with our brains more? I'm with qwzybug, I echo his sentiment.

DennisP 16y ago
Nobody thinks it will suddenly happen now. They think that Moore's Law will continue for another fifty or seventy years, and that somewhere in there, computers or computer-human hybrids will start to be smarter than unenhanced humans. What happens after that, we're not smart enough right now to predict.