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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 Hol
by 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 agoTangential: 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 agoBiology 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 agoSure, 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.