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Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its defini
by gumby 3y ago
Just to clarify, the “singularity” conjectures a slightly different and more interesting phenomenon, one driven by technological advances, true, but its definition was not those advances.
It was more the second derivative of future shock: technologies and culture that enabled and encouraged faster and faster change until the curve bent essentially vertical…asymptotimg to a mathematical singularity.
An example my he spoke of was that, close to the singularity, someone might found a corporation, develop a technology, make a profit from it, and then have it be obsolete by noon.
And because you can’t see the shape of the curve on the other side of such a singularity, people living on the other side of it would be incomprehensible to people on this side.
Ray Lafferty’s 1965 story “Slow Tuesday Night” explored this phenomenon years before Toffler wrote “Future Shock”
- ethagnawl 3y agoHere's a link to the full text of _Slow Tuesday Night_: https://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/scifiction/classics/classics_archive/lafferty5/lafferty51.html https://web.archive.org/web/20060719184509/www.scifi.com/sci...
- PaulHoule 3y agoNote that the "Singularity" turns up in the novel https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marooned_in_Realtime where people can use a "Bobble" to freeze themselves in a stasis field and travel in time... forward. The singularity is some mysterious event that causes all of unbobbled humanity to disappear leaving the survivors wondering, even 10s of millions of years later, what happened. As such it is one of the best pretenses ever in sci-fi. (I am left wondering though if the best cultural comparison is "The Rapture" some Christians believe in making this more of a religiously motivated concept as opposed to sound futurism.) I've long been fascinated by this differential equation dx -- = x^2 dt which has solutions that look like x = 1/(t₀-t) which notably blows up at time t₀. It's a model of an "intelligence explosion" where improving technology speeds up the rate of technological process but the very low growth when t ≪ t₀ could also be a model for why it is hard to bootstrap a two-sided market, why some settlements fail, etc. About 20 years ago I was very interested in ecological accounting and wondering if we could outrace resource depletion and related problems and did a literature search for people developing models like this further and was pretty disappointed not to find much also it did appear as a footnote in the ecology literature here and there. Even papers like https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10singmodels2.pdf https://agi-conf.org/2010/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/agi10si... seem to miss it. (Surprised the lesswrong folks haven't picked it up but they don't seem too mathematically inclined) --- Note I don't believe in the intelligence explosion because what we've seen in "Moore's law" recently is that each generation of chips is getting much more difficult and expensive to develop whereas the benefits of shrinks are shrinking and in fact we might be rudely surprised that the state of the art chips of the new future (and possibly 2024) burn up pretty quickly. It's not so clear that chipmakers would have continued to invest in a new generation if governments weren't piling huge money into a "great powers" competition... That is, already we might be past the point of economic returns.
- tim333 3y agoI'm also a bit sceptical of an intelligence explosion but compute per dollar has increased in a steady exponential way long before Moore's law and will probably continue after it. There are ways to progress other than shrinking transistors.
- PaulHoule 3y agoEven though we understand a lot more about how LLMs work and have cut resource consumption dramatically in the last year we still know hardly anything so it seems quite likely there is a better way to do it. For one thing dense vectors for language seem kinda insane to me. Change one pixel in a picture and it makes no difference to the meaning. Change one letter in a sentence and you can change the meaning completely so a continuous representation seems fundamentally wrong.
- dekhn 3y agoIMHO Marooned in Realtime is the best Vinge book. Besides being a dual mystery novel, it really explores the implications of bobble technology and how just a few hours of technology development near the singularity can be extreme.
- PaulHoule 3y ago