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I'm of the school of thought that says that the Singularity Theory is just fundamentally unsound. In particular the "futurism" school which tries to extrapolat

• marssaxman 2y ago
  I was able to get more excited about these exponential curve models when I was younger, but these days there is always a skeptical voice in the back of my head predicting that a logistic function will prove to be a better fit, considering that we live on a finite planet.
• observationist 2y ago
  You've fundamentally misunderstood what the singularity is. It's when technological progress outpaces the capacity for any person to control or understand what's happening. We get a taste of this, with the internet, for example - no country or person or entity can control what gets published online. We see an enormous amount of bots posting random slop on platforms, spam emails, or outright spam websites being published. We see a huge number of invalid scientific papers published to "legitimate" journals. That information far exceeds the capacity for any person to read the whole, let alone understand or control it. The singularity refers to a point in time specifically when technology is being iterated and developed so rapidly that nobody can know what tomorrow will bring. Irving J Good said it best: "Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an 'intelligence explosion,' and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make." The singularity is an inevitability. It's a recognition of a fact about the universe. There will come a point in time where humans aren't the top of the food chain anymore. We won't be in control of technological development. It's not any specific set of technologies or a particular threshold of research hours per day or anything which can be easily quantified like that. It's the collective output being greater than the sum of its parts, in ways that are fundamentally unpredictable, with unpredictable consequences. Kurzweil's predictions have been irritatingly accurate. This blog post is irritatingly ignorant. Brains are fleshy computers in bone vats. You simulate your very own Matrix every single conscious moment of your existence. Computation is what brains do. Disputing this is putting ignorance of either brains or computers on display. Computation is sufficient to explaining anything and everything brains do. It's the simplest explanation, it's scientifically coherent, and there is a total absence of any evidence of any phenomena or feature that is unexplained by brains-as-computers. The more we implement functions of intelligence in computer software, the faster technological development occurs, and more of the intellectual development starts to occur in artificial minds.
  • andrewla 2y ago
    > It's when technological progress outpaces the capacity for any person to control or understand what's happening This seems very imprecise. I don't know how literally to take this. We passed this point just about 10,000 years ago. Probably even further back than that. > The singularity refers to a point in time specifically when technology is being iterated and developed so rapidly that nobody can know what tomorrow will bring. Is this literally tomorrow or figuratively tomorrow? I'm looking for more of a precise statement and I feel like I'm getting metaphors that are already literally true and have been for thousands of years. The quote about ultraintelligent machines seems fundamentally unsound. The unit of consciousness or intelligent capacity is not well defined so I don't see a reason that e.g. a group of people would not be considered "ultraintelligent" with respect to the individuals that comprise the group. How fast this "machine" thinks is important too because if designing the next level of intelligence takes exponentially more time than the last then I don't think we have to worry. We could similarly talk about having a program that solves the halting problem and how it would be the last program that we have to write. Doesn't mean that such a thing is possible much less inevitable. In the case of intelligence I don't think we have enough understanding to even say whether the proposition about ultra intelligent machines is even well-posed. As far as I've seen, there are almost zero predictions that Kurzweil has made that are accurate aside from some trivial ones about speech recognition (his actual area of research) and even there almost irrelevantly true -- we have voice interfaces and they can recognize speech but they suck ass and people prefer to use non-speech interfaces.
    • observationist 2y ago
      You need to read the statement from the context of "in principle" vs "in practice". When, in principle, no human has the capacity to understand or control a thing. A forest fire is a great thought experiment - we can, in principle, control and understand any forest fire. Given enough time and resources, no forest fire will ever exceed our theoretical capacity to control it. In principle, the technological rate of progress will exceed humanity's capacity to understand or control it. It will become a thing which happens to us, as opposed to us doing things. Intelligence is one of those "we know it when we see it" problems. It literally encompasses the entirety of human cognition. Moravec described AI capabilities in terms of human equivalence, avoiding the need for any specific and well defined unit of measurement. If and when AI capabilities exceed human capabilities in any and every possible capacity, AI will be more intelligent than humans, and we can be certain that AGI is achieved. When we run out of "but machines can't do X as well as a human!" statements, we'll have achieved software that, when reproduced, optimized, and tasked en masse, will represent superintelligence. There are multiple paths to get there. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of books covering the topic in depth. There's no "exponentially more time than the last" issue with AI development. The halting problem can't be solved - that's the point of the halting problem. We have sufficient understanding of computation and intelligence to say that there is nothing about the laws of physics, or the way biological brains work that even remotely suggests that anything brains do is impossible, or even particularly difficult, for silicon chips to achieve. The bottleneck in reproducing brains in silicon right now is data. Because of ethical and technical challenges, we can't gain access to the low level details of living brain tissue, but the science of connectome mapping, neurochemistry, and real-time electrical activity tracking continues to improve, and we will absolutely have mapped the entirety of the human brain down to the molecular level at some point in the next century. Given that information, we'll be able to recreate important structures in software, and produce functional equivalents to things like cortical neural columns and minicolumns, and we'll gain access to Hebbian dynamics that govern the wiring and growth of synapses, allowing us to recreate the rules that comprise human intelligence. That's the upper bound on when we're going to achieve artificial general intelligence - it may take a decade or two after we've got the map, but it's likely to happen a long time before we get the complete map, because much of what the brain is doing is based on highly repeated structures distributed throughout the neocortex - figure out how they work, how their behavior is coordinated, and how that produces learning and behavior, and you crack the problem of intelligence.
• marcosdumay 2y ago
  > what would it take to disprove it? The actual one with all the dates in it, well, the dates are enough. We are not there. But if you are complaining about the general idea that machines will eventually be more capable than humans in every task, and then we can't predict what will happen... If you give up on that "every task"part because it's clearly not necessary, technology has done that a few times already. I don't know how can anybody complain about it except for the reason that it's not an interesting observation.