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This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the singularity movement is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in an afterlife and hope in sci

This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the singularity movement is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in an afterlife and hope in scientific immortality seem quite similar. While research into singularity and anti-aging could be better funded, I'm not sure why we need to 'believe' in these things or make sure we join the correct denominations (transhumanist vs non-transhumanist). Besides, unless the universe is infinite we're just arguing about timeframes. I prefer not to think about death as annihilation because death doesn't mean that we never existed, we each have our unique portion of space-time.

mixmax 18y ago
The singularity won't happen: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-never-arrive.html http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...
- Retric 18y ago
  There are limits to computation, but nothing prevents computers from achieving human or super human level intelligence. I suspect that 50 years from now we will have human level AI for a wide range of things. We have already passed that point for Chess and one by one other things will fall. What really prevents the singularity is the limits of the physical world. The speed of light is already a problem such that PC ram is never going to drop in latency without moving it closer to the CPU. I don't care how smart you are you can't build a 101% efficient engine etc.
  - listic 18y ago
    Are there any real signs of progress in computers that could lead to them achieving human level intelligence? Look, computer beat world champion in chess over 10 years ago, but is nowhere close to doing that in Go anytime soon: http://ru.ly/34 http://ru.ly/34
    - jcl 18y ago
      I wouldn't say "nowhere close", as the quality of computer go players has improved dramatically in the last year or so: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/08/1243244&from=rss http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/08/1243244&#3...
    - Retric 18y ago
      Like CAPTA's? I would say the number of things computers can do better than people is growing. They are not unified in a single project but computers are gaining around 100x the computational ability every 10 years so the gap between 1% as smart as a human and human level intelegence can close rapidly. http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?page=6 http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?pag... Granted the human brain has around 100 billion neurons vs 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between. However 100,000,000,000 / 10,000 is only 1/10,000,000 which is around 30 years unless the software becomes more efficient. PS: I don't think directly simulating a brain is the most efficient method of reaching human level AI but it's hard to see how it would fail.
  - palish 18y ago
    "We have already passed that point for Chess..." No we haven't. Computers play chess by examining all possible outcomes, then choosing the optimal one. That seems to be how humans play chess too. But if you think about it, humans are much more spontaneous than that. We haven't succeeded in coding "spontaneity" yet.
    - dfranke 18y ago
      Spontaneity is just a synonym for "I don't understand what's going on when this happens".
- rsheridan6 18y ago
  There's no contradiction between Malthus and the coming of the singularity. Malthus essentially said that resources tend to be scarce, but there's no reason that they couldn't be scarce post-singularity. This line of thinking leads to doom scenarios, when you think about how scarce resources would be allocated (bottom line - probably not to humans), so it does contradict singularity-as-the-promised-land scenarios.
  - mixmax 18y ago
    Scarcity means that the curve will break. The singularity is the notion that the growth will continue indefinitely at an ever wilder pace until it reaches a singularity. I'm saying it won't happen because technological advance will run into scarcity of resources, just like any other complex system. Malthus was just an example of this, since his thinking was much the same as Kurzweil's in regard to extrapolation of datasets. Whether this will happen before or after transhumanism I don't know. But like any other exponential curve it won't go on forever.
    - gjm11 18y ago
      "Singularity" here doesn't mean "infinite improvement", it means "such a big improvement that, from the point of view of people trying to predict it now, all bets are off". At least, that's how Vinge used the word and I think it's the commonest usage among present-day singularitarians like Yudkowsky.
      - pfedor 18y ago
        One thing I never got: sure, it's certainly possible that one day the technology will come into existence that will create beings (be it computers or genetically modified brains or whatever) that will be as superior to humans as we are to ants or rabbits. How on Earth does the singulatarian paradise follow from this premise? Doesn't it seem at least just as likely that those super-intelligent creations will eradicate humans, or enslave them, or do something to them which we don't have a concept for in our limited brains, and which is different from happy immortal existence?
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  The Malthusians have had egg of their face for the better part of two centuries now. Maybe one of these days they will be right. Still a pretty bad record overall, though.
yters 18y ago
And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 Someone thought maxwell's demon and the fluctuation theorem provided a way around the 2nd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 but I'm not convinced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 "Thanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling. Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine. The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false."
- newsycaccount 18y ago
  How about a tiny, molecular sized ratchet, that would absorb vibrations due to heat and turn one way, but refuse to turn the other way due to it's ratchet teeth. These could then be hooked up to a generator for free power.
  - yters 18y ago
    Interesting, don't know if that reverses entropy, though.
    - newsycaccount 18y ago
      It doesn't =) If you have enough heat to make it click forward, you also get random bounces on the prawl which themselves make it go in reverse as much as forward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
      - 18y ago
kirse 18y ago
Your comment was similar to one I was going to make... It's interesting to see that man still seeks that feeling of meaning (in life) and hope (after death) even when they do not believe in a God/afterlife. How does one find value in life when - in the long run - their entire existence will be forgotten and their species just a blip on the timeline of Evolution? If you think about it, on the infinite (or even extremely large) timeline of this universe, our individual value pretty much equals 0. Sure, in the short run it is evident that one's life can have value and purpose to humanity. Many powerful leaders and wars have proven this. But so what? Our egos won't be around to reap the glory of knowing that either. Zooming out to the larger timeline - or the big picture - of this universe, I can't see how someone finds value in this present life without a convincing belief in either: 1) God/Afterlife 2) The existence of a solution to mortality Life without one of those beliefs would be like working hard with the goal of a profitable business but knowing that in the long-run my business would never turn over a single dollar of profit. It's pretty obvious that the big picture negates the short-term goals and meaning of that work.
- zupatol 18y ago
  3) Finding value in what you're doing right now. Life should be like running a profitable business, which you know will not last forever. The point of your business is giving a value to your customers today. Eventually a competing business will cater better to your customers' needs and put you out of business. This doesn't take away the value you've given your customers, nor the money you made. Going one step further, the business does not even need to be profitable. You can find value in activities which are economically and socially useless most of the time, like art for example.
  - Eliezer 18y ago
    Yeah, I think I'll stick with that "Get out of Earth" one, but thanks for the suggestion. "On a grand scale we simply want to save the world, so obviously we're just letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment and we're doomed to failure since we didn't pick some cheap-ass two-bit goal like collecting all the Garbage Pail Kids cards." -- http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject_Nenslo.html http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject...
aswanson 18y ago
You can boil any human aspiration evocative of hope, happiness, and progress to this defintion of "religious". Does this invalidate the drive?
- robg 18y ago
  To me, it validates the drive. Just as language is universal, so is the effort to make meaning. Those two qualities bind us as humans.
- zupatol 18y ago
  He seems to define religion as "stories you make up to convince yourself you won't die". Religion is a lot more than that, but this part of religion does seem a bit dumb.
- greendestiny 18y ago
  Its not about hope, its about a belief giving you that ultimate existential succor. Its particularly noticeable in this article which is so dismissive of religious hope in the afterlife.
nokarma 18y ago
This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the space race is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in ascending to Heaven and hope in engineering feats seem quite similar. While research into aeronautics and rocket motors could be better funded, I'm not sure why we need to 'believe' in these things or make sure we join the correct aerospace company. Besides, unless the universe is infinite we're just arguing about distances. I prefer not to think about death as annihilation because I'm afraid of turning into worm food.
- greendestiny 18y ago
  I'm not sure what point you think this makes. That comment would be an appropriate response to someone writing an article about how space travel will free us from the fear of death and how we can only really have hope if we are spacehumanists.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]

mixmax 18y ago

The singularity won't happen: http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-never-arrive.html http://www.maximise.dk/blog/2008/11/why-singularity-may-neve...

Retric 18y ago
There are limits to computation, but nothing prevents computers from achieving human or super human level intelligence. I suspect that 50 years from now we will have human level AI for a wide range of things. We have already passed that point for Chess and one by one other things will fall. What really prevents the singularity is the limits of the physical world. The speed of light is already a problem such that PC ram is never going to drop in latency without moving it closer to the CPU. I don't care how smart you are you can't build a 101% efficient engine etc.
- listic 18y ago
  Are there any real signs of progress in computers that could lead to them achieving human level intelligence? Look, computer beat world champion in chess over 10 years ago, but is nowhere close to doing that in Go anytime soon: http://ru.ly/34 http://ru.ly/34
  - jcl 18y ago
    I wouldn't say "nowhere close", as the quality of computer go players has improved dramatically in the last year or so: http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/08/1243244&from=rss http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/08/08/1243244&#3...
  - Retric 18y ago
    Like CAPTA's? I would say the number of things computers can do better than people is growing. They are not unified in a single project but computers are gaining around 100x the computational ability every 10 years so the gap between 1% as smart as a human and human level intelegence can close rapidly. http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?page=6 http://seedmagazine.com/news/2008/03/out_of_the_blue.php?pag... Granted the human brain has around 100 billion neurons vs 10,000 neurons, with about 30 million synaptic connections between. However 100,000,000,000 / 10,000 is only 1/10,000,000 which is around 30 years unless the software becomes more efficient. PS: I don't think directly simulating a brain is the most efficient method of reaching human level AI but it's hard to see how it would fail.
- palish 18y ago
  "We have already passed that point for Chess..." No we haven't. Computers play chess by examining all possible outcomes, then choosing the optimal one. That seems to be how humans play chess too. But if you think about it, humans are much more spontaneous than that. We haven't succeeded in coding "spontaneity" yet.
  - dfranke 18y ago
    Spontaneity is just a synonym for "I don't understand what's going on when this happens".
rsheridan6 18y ago
There's no contradiction between Malthus and the coming of the singularity. Malthus essentially said that resources tend to be scarce, but there's no reason that they couldn't be scarce post-singularity. This line of thinking leads to doom scenarios, when you think about how scarce resources would be allocated (bottom line - probably not to humans), so it does contradict singularity-as-the-promised-land scenarios.
- mixmax 18y ago
  Scarcity means that the curve will break. The singularity is the notion that the growth will continue indefinitely at an ever wilder pace until it reaches a singularity. I'm saying it won't happen because technological advance will run into scarcity of resources, just like any other complex system. Malthus was just an example of this, since his thinking was much the same as Kurzweil's in regard to extrapolation of datasets. Whether this will happen before or after transhumanism I don't know. But like any other exponential curve it won't go on forever.
  - gjm11 18y ago
    "Singularity" here doesn't mean "infinite improvement", it means "such a big improvement that, from the point of view of people trying to predict it now, all bets are off". At least, that's how Vinge used the word and I think it's the commonest usage among present-day singularitarians like Yudkowsky.
    - pfedor 18y ago
      One thing I never got: sure, it's certainly possible that one day the technology will come into existence that will create beings (be it computers or genetically modified brains or whatever) that will be as superior to humans as we are to ants or rabbits. How on Earth does the singulatarian paradise follow from this premise? Doesn't it seem at least just as likely that those super-intelligent creations will eradicate humans, or enslave them, or do something to them which we don't have a concept for in our limited brains, and which is different from happy immortal existence?
Prrometheus 18y ago
The Malthusians have had egg of their face for the better part of two centuries now. Maybe one of these days they will be right. Still a pretty bad record overall, though.

yters 18y ago

And the 2nd law of thermodynamics is another gotcha, as I posted in the other Yudkowsky thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377510 Someone thought maxwell's demon and the fluctuation theorem provided a way around the 2nd http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maxwell%27s_demon http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=110074 but I'm not convinced: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=377625 "Thanks, those are interesting links. Still, nothing there that seems especially compelling. Maxwell's demon assumes the energy cost for sorting the molecules is less than the net gain. That looks like another variant of the perpetual motion machine. The fluctuation theorem says the 2nd law doesn't hold for very, very small entities, but its probability of being correct climbs exponentially as the system scales. So, it is fallacious to then say the 2nd law may not hold at the macro level due to it not holding at the micro level, since the theorem used to support this idea is itself an instance of the idea being false."

newsycaccount 18y ago
How about a tiny, molecular sized ratchet, that would absorb vibrations due to heat and turn one way, but refuse to turn the other way due to it's ratchet teeth. These could then be hooked up to a generator for free power.
- yters 18y ago
  Interesting, don't know if that reverses entropy, though.
  - newsycaccount 18y ago
    It doesn't =) If you have enough heat to make it click forward, you also get random bounces on the prawl which themselves make it go in reverse as much as forward. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownian_ratchet
    - 18y ago

kirse 18y ago

Your comment was similar to one I was going to make... It's interesting to see that man still seeks that feeling of meaning (in life) and hope (after death) even when they do not believe in a God/afterlife. How does one find value in life when - in the long run - their entire existence will be forgotten and their species just a blip on the timeline of Evolution? If you think about it, on the infinite (or even extremely large) timeline of this universe, our individual value pretty much equals 0. Sure, in the short run it is evident that one's life can have value and purpose to humanity. Many powerful leaders and wars have proven this. But so what? Our egos won't be around to reap the glory of knowing that either. Zooming out to the larger timeline - or the big picture - of this universe, I can't see how someone finds value in this present life without a convincing belief in either: 1) God/Afterlife 2) The existence of a solution to mortality Life without one of those beliefs would be like working hard with the goal of a profitable business but knowing that in the long-run my business would never turn over a single dollar of profit. It's pretty obvious that the big picture negates the short-term goals and meaning of that work.

zupatol 18y ago
3) Finding value in what you're doing right now. Life should be like running a profitable business, which you know will not last forever. The point of your business is giving a value to your customers today. Eventually a competing business will cater better to your customers' needs and put you out of business. This doesn't take away the value you've given your customers, nor the money you made. Going one step further, the business does not even need to be profitable. You can find value in activities which are economically and socially useless most of the time, like art for example.
- Eliezer 18y ago
  Yeah, I think I'll stick with that "Get out of Earth" one, but thanks for the suggestion. "On a grand scale we simply want to save the world, so obviously we're just letting ourselves in for a lot of disappointment and we're doomed to failure since we didn't pick some cheap-ass two-bit goal like collecting all the Garbage Pail Kids cards." -- http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject_Nenslo.html http://www.subgenius.com/bigfist/answers/rants/X0044_Subject...

aswanson 18y ago

You can boil any human aspiration evocative of hope, happiness, and progress to this defintion of "religious". Does this invalidate the drive?

robg 18y ago
To me, it validates the drive. Just as language is universal, so is the effort to make meaning. Those two qualities bind us as humans.
zupatol 18y ago
He seems to define religion as "stories you make up to convince yourself you won't die". Religion is a lot more than that, but this part of religion does seem a bit dumb.
greendestiny 18y ago
Its not about hope, its about a belief giving you that ultimate existential succor. Its particularly noticeable in this article which is so dismissive of religious hope in the afterlife.

nokarma 18y ago

This doesn't do anything to dissuade me of the notion that the space race is a religious movement. The comfort of hope in ascending to Heaven and hope in engineering feats seem quite similar. While research into aeronautics and rocket motors could be better funded, I'm not sure why we need to 'believe' in these things or make sure we join the correct aerospace company. Besides, unless the universe is infinite we're just arguing about distances. I prefer not to think about death as annihilation because I'm afraid of turning into worm food.

greendestiny 18y ago
I'm not sure what point you think this makes. That comment would be an appropriate response to someone writing an article about how space travel will free us from the fear of death and how we can only really have hope if we are spacehumanists.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]