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The reference to the origin of the concept of a singularity was better than most, but still misunderstood it: > In 1993 Vernor Vinge drew on computer science a
by gumby 3y ago
The reference to the origin of the concept of a singularity was better than most, but still misunderstood it:
> In 1993 Vernor Vinge drew on computer science and his fellow science-fiction writers to argue that ordinary human history was drawing to a close. We would surely create superhuman intelligence sometime within the next three decades, leading to a “Singularity”, in which AI would start feeding on itself.
Yes it was Vernor, but he said something much more interesting: that as the speed of innovation itself sped up (the derivative of acceleration) the curve could bend up until it became essentially vertical, literally a singularity in the curve. And then things on the other side of that singularity would be incomprehensible to those of us on our side of it. This is reflected in Peace and Fire upon the deep and other of his novels going back before the essay.
You can see in this idea is itself rooted in ideas from Alvin Toffler in the 70s (Future Shock) and Ray Lafferty in the 60s (e.g. Slow Tuesday Night).
So AI machines were just part of the enabling phenomena -- the most important, and yes the center of his '93 essay. But the core of the metaphor was broader than that.
I'm a little disappointed that The Economist, of all publications, didn't get ths quite right, but in their defense, it was a bit tangental to the point of the essay.
- elteto 3y agoThank you for this great explanation of where "singularity" comes from in this context. Always wondered.
- gardenhedge 3y agoTIL, thanks
- galangalalgol 3y agoRainbows End is another good one where he explores the earlier part of the curve, the elbow perhaps. Some of that stuff is already happening and that book isn't so old.
- mercutio2 3y agoRainbow’s End was by far the best guess at what near future ubiquitous computing would look like than anyone else’s for decades. It got so many things right, it’s really amazing. I really wish he’d written more.
- SubiculumCode 3y agoIts one of my favorite sci fi that none of my friends have read.
- ghaff 3y agoA related concept comes from social progression by historical measures. Based on pretty much any metrics, Why the West Rules for Now shows that the industrial revolution essentially went vertical and that prior measures--including the rise of the Roman Empire and its fall--were essentially insignificant.
- stvltvs 3y ago> derivative of acceleration Was this intended literally? I'm skeptical that saying something so precise about a fuzzy metric like rate of innovation is warranted. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jerk_(physics)
- dougmwne 3y agoI believe the point being made is that the rate of innovation over time would turn asymptotic as the acceleration increased, creating a point in time of infinite progress. On one side would be human history as we know and on the other, every innovation possible would happen all in a moment. The prediction was specifically that we were going to infinity in less than infinite time.
- bloppe 3y agoYou only reach a vertical asymptote if every derivative up to the infinite order is increasing. That means acceleration, jerk, snap, crackle, pop, etc. are all increasing. The physical world tends to have certain constraints that make such true singularities impossible. For example, the universal speed limit: c. But, you could argues that we could approximate a singularity well enough to fool us humans.
- travisjungroth 3y agoThey’re impossible with our current technology and understanding of physics. The idea is what’s beyond that. Access to a realm outside of time is just the sort of thing that could cause a singularity.
- Retric 3y agoSaying impossible under our current understanding of physics is a massive understatement. It’s would require not just new physics but a very very specific kind of universe with zero evidence in support of it. Suggesting the singularity is physically possible is roughly like suggesting that human telekinesis is possible, ie physics would need many very interesting errors.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago> In 1993 Vernor Vinge drew on computer science and his fellow science-fiction writers to argue that ordinary human history was drawing to a close Note that this category of hypothesis was common in various disciplines at the end of the Cold War [1]. (Vinge's being unique because the precipice lies ahead, not behind.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Las...
- dekhn 3y agoI think it's worth going back and reading Vinge's "The Coming Technological Singularity" (https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html) and then follow it up reading The Peace War, but most importantly its unappreciated detective novel sequel, Marooned In Realtime, which explores some of the interesting implications about people who live right before the singularity. I think this book is even better than Fire Upon the Deep. When I read the Coming Technological Singularity back in the mid-90s it resonated with me and for a while I was a singularitarian- basically, dedicated to learning enough technology, and doing enough projects that I could help contribute to that singularity. Nowadays I think that's not the best way to spend my time, but it was interesting to meet Larry Page and see that he had concluded something familiar (for those not aware, Larry founded Google to provide a consistent revenue stream to carry out ML research to enable the singularity, and would be quite happy if robots replaced humans). [ edit: I reread "The Coming Technogical Singularity". There's an entire section at the bottom that pretty much covers the past 5 years of generative models as a form of intelligence augmentation, he was very prescient. ]
- Guthur 3y agoI yet ~30 years later we're still predominantly hacking stuff together with python.
- dekhn 3y agoI believe there's an entire section in Deepness In The Sky about how future coders a million years from now are still hacking stuff together with python.
- Guthur 3y agoWe have better tools they're just apparently too hard for us to use, yet some how in the same thought we think we can create anything remotely like intelligence, very odd cognitive dissonance.
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- bloppe 3y ago> I'm a little disappointed that The Economist, of all publications, didn't get ths quite right It's a guest essay. The Economist does not edit guest essays. They routinely publish guest essays from unabashed propagandists as well.
- racunnin 3y agoYes, all media organisations of a certain age have an agenda / bias, the Economist is no different: https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/40025/what-the-economist-doesnt-tell-you https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/culture/40025/what-the-ec...
- leereeves 3y ago> Vernor...said something much more interesting: that as the speed of innovation itself sped up (the derivative of acceleration) the curve could bend up until it became essentially vertical, literally a singularity in the curve. In other words, Vernor described an exponential curve. But are there any exponential curves in reality? AFAIK they always hit resource limits where growth stops. That is, anything that looks like an exponential curve eventually becomes an S-shaped curve.
- mjcohen 3y agoAn exponential curve is not a singularity; 1/(x-a) is as x goes to a.
- dekhn 3y agoTo the extent that a normal human mind can see beyond the singularity, one imagines that we would experience an exponential growth but not even be able to comprehend the later flattening of that exponential into a sigmoid (since nearly all the exponentials we see are sigmoids in disguise.
- simiones 3y agoThis is not about "beyond the singularity", the point is that there is no reason to believe technological progress could approach a singularity. It's silly extrapolation of the same nature as "I've lost 1kg dieting this week, so by this time next year I'll be 52kg lighter!".
- shagie 3y agoI tried using AI. It scared me. - Tom Scott https://youtu.be/jPhJbKBuNnA https://youtu.be/jPhJbKBuNnA I'm also gonna recommend Accelerando - https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/accelerando/accelerando-intro.html https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/fiction/acceler... As an aside, I'd also recommend Glasshouse (also by Charles Stross) as an exploration into the human remnants post singularity (and war)... followed by Implied Spaces by Walter Jon Williams... > “I and my confederates,” Aristide said, “did our best to prevent that degree of autonomy among artificial intelligences. We made the decision to turn away from the Vingean Singularity before most people even knew what it was. But—” He made a gesture with his hands as if dropping a ball. “—I claim no more than the average share of wisdom. We could have made mistakes.” for a singularity averted approach of what could be done. One more I'll toss in, is The Freeze-Frame Revolution by Peter Watts which feels like you're missing a lot of the story (but it is because that's one book of a series) and... well... spoilers.
- hyperthesis 3y agoNot literally a singularity, just incomprehensible from the past. Arguably all points on a technological exponential have this property.
- creer 3y agoYes! Someone elsewhere mentions the engineers of the first printing press trying to imagine the future of literature (someone adds: and/or advertising). On the other side of that invention taking off. My go-to example is that we have run into similar things with the pace and volume of "Science". For a long while one could be a scientific gentleman and keep up with the sciences. As a whole. Then quite suddenly, on the other side, you couldn't and you had to settle for one field. And then it happened again: people noticed that you can't master one field even, on the current side. And you have to become a hyper-specialist to master your niche. You can still be a generalist - in order to attack specific questions - but you better have contacts who are hyper-specialists for what you really need.
- kristiandupont 3y agoI feel like I experienced this up close in IT. When I was a kid in the 90's, I was the "computer guy" on the street and people would ask me whenever anything was wrong with their computer. If any piece of software or hardware wasn't working, there was a good chance I could help and I loved it. Today, I am trying (but struggling!) to keep up with the evolving libraries and frameworks for frontend development in Typescript!
- kazinator 3y agoIn their defense, they spent 3 minutes googling the origin of the term, and don't know anything about the book.
- haolez 3y agoWhat does it mean "to be on the other side" of this singularity in your graphic representation? I failed to grasp this.
- gumby 3y agoConsider my 86 yo mother: extremely intelligent and competent, a physician. She struggled conceptually with her iPhone because she was used to reading the manual for a device and learning all its behavior and affordances. Even though she has a laptop she runs the same set of programs on it. But the phone is protean and she struggles with its shapeshifting. It’s intuitive and simple to you and me. But languages change, slang changes, metaphors change and equipment changes. Business models exist today that were unthinkable 40 years ago because the ubiquity of computation did not exist. She’s suffering, in Toffler’s words, a “future shock”. Now imagine that another 40 years worth of innovation happens in a decade. And then again in the subsequent five. And faster. You’ll have a hard time keeping up. And not just you: kids will too. Things become incomprehensible without machines doing most of the work — including explanation. Eventually you, or your kids, won’t even understand what’s going on 90% of the time…then less and less. I sometimes like to muse on what a Victorian person would make of today if transported through time. Or someone from 16th century Europe. Or Archimedes. They’d mostly understand a lot, I think. But lately I’ve started to think of someone from the 1950s. They might even find today harder to understand than the others would. That crossover point is when the world becomes incomprehensible in a flash. That’s a mathematical singularity (metaphorically speaking).
- andsoitis 3y ago> I sometimes like to muse on what a Victorian person would make of today if transported through time. Or someone from 16th century Europe. Or Archimedes. They’d mostly understand a lot, I think. But lately I’ve started to think of someone from the 1950s. They might even find today harder to understand than the others would. why do you think someone from the 50s would find it harder to understand our time, than someone from an earlier age, even as far back as 2000 years?
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- WalterBright 3y agoThe idea was present in "Colossus The Forbin Project" 1970. The computer starts out fairly crude, but learns at an exponential rate. It designs extensions to itself to further accelerate it.
- ChatGTP 3y agoI guess at some point it stops being a computer though?
- mc32 3y agoThey say Von Neumann talked about a tech singularity back in the late '50s (attested by Ulam), Vinge popularized it in the mid 80s and Kurzweil took it over with his book in the aughts.
- aktuel 3y agoIt's like exponential growth, whether that's in a petri dish or on earth. It looks like that until it doesn't. Singularities don't happen in the real world. Never have and never will. If someone tells you something about a singularity, that's a pretty perfect indicator that there's still some more understanding to be done.
- robotresearcher 3y agoThere’s a case to be made that DNA, eukaryotes, photosynthesis, insects, etc were singularities. Each transformed the entire planet forever.
- mcv 3y agoThe thing I never understood is: why would it go vertical? It would at best be an exponential curve, and I have doubts about that. I admit looking at the 100 years before 1993, it looks like innovation is constantly speeding up, but even then there's not going to be a moment that we suddenly have infinite knowledge. There's no such thing as infinite knowledge; it's still bound by physical limits. It still takes time and resources to actually do something with it. And if you look at the past 30 years, it doesn't really look like innovation is speeding up at all. There is plenty of innovation, but is it happening at an ever faster pace? I don't see it. Not to mention that much of it is hype and fashion, and not really fundamentally new. Even AI progress is driven mostly by faster hardware and more data, and not really fundamentally new technologies. And that's not even getting into the science crisis: lots of science is not really reproducible. And while LLMs are certainly an exciting new technology, it's not at all clear that they're really more than a glorified autocorrect. So I'm extremely skeptical about those singularity ideas. It's an exciting SciFi idea, but I don't think it's true. And certainly not within the next 30 years.
- bratbag 3y agoIts infinite from the perspective of our side of the curve. It's another application of advanced technology appearing to be magic, but imagine transitioning into it in a matter of hours, then with that advanced tech transitioning further into damn-near godhood within minutes. Then imagine what happens in the second after that. It may be operating within the boundaries of physics, but they would be physical rules well beyond our understanding and may even be infinite by our own limited definition of physics. That's the curve.
- sfn42 3y agoI think it's completely ridiculous how you people just casually imply that a current computer can somehow achieve "damn-near godhood". Hardware is a bottleneck. Better hardware can't be designed, manufactured and installed in minutes. You can't just infinitely improve software sitting on the same hardware. At some point the software is as efficient as it can possibly be. And realistically a complex piece of software won't be close to optimal. You people love dreaming up possibilities but you never stop to actually think about the limitations. You just assume everything will work out magically and satisfy your fantasy.
- tim333 3y agoVinge didn't originate the concept in 1993. It was John von Neumann, of von Neumann computer architecture fame, in 1958. >...accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue. Personally it's always bugged me that the "technological singularity" is some vague vision rather than a mathematical singularity. I suggest we redefine it at the amount of goods you can produce with one hour of human labour. When the robots can do it with zero human labour you get division by zero and a proper singularity.
- proamdev123 3y agoI love that idea! It really grounds the idea in a useful metric.