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Um. The Singularity isn't religious in its origin. It's literally a reference to a mathematical singularity. I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characte

Um. The Singularity isn't religious in its origin. It's literally a reference to a mathematical singularity. I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characterization, but this is a big one to get wrong. What the term has become in its pseudo-cult modern context is entirely divorced from what it came out of.

AlexCoventry 2y ago
I don't know; there was definitely an apocalyptic quality to the Singularity in Marooned In Real Time, and superintelligences in A Fire Upon the Deep were literally referred to as Gods (there's a brief reference to Applied Theology in there, IIRC.) So you could argue that there was at least an unconscious parallel to religion in the way Vernor Vinge saw the Singularity.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  That's hardly an unconscious parallel. That's a direct, atheist take. The whole attempt at casting transhumanism as religion is silly. Transhumanist side says, "there's no supernatural God, but sufficiently advanced technology could approximate it" - and then people turn around and say, "you see, you say enough technology is like a god, therefore you're religious and believe in God (specifically in Christian God per mainstream religion, with all its mores)". <facepalm> Like X != X.
  - simiones 2y ago
    Religion and theism are orthogonal concepts. You can be an atheist and religious at the same time - many Buddhist sects are entirely atheistic, for example. Many cults are also atheistic. A good example of atheistic, even materialistic, religion was the official doctrine of the USSR, "marxist dialectical materialism". This had all of the hallmarks of a religion, complete with religious texts, priests, condemnation of non-believers, and so on - but caked in fully materialistic and dogmatically atheist concepts.
    - TeMPOraL 2y ago
      In this sense, free market maximalism is a materialistic religion of its own. Still, this is not the framing that people calling transhumanism a religion use. The arguments are usually trying to show parallels between transhumanist beliefs/theories and theistic religious beliefs (almost always Christianity) - specifically to say, "look, it sounds like Christianity if you substitute AI for God and Singularity for Rapture, therefore this is just rebranded Christianity, not Science", therefore implying the transhumanists are wrong. The argument is, literally, "this pattern-matches to religion therefore must be just as wrong", and I'm saying it's a dumb argument.
- michaelgburton 2y ago
  Here's the Vinge paper most folks cite when talking about The Singularity. https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html There's a lot of speculation in there, but it's pretty carefully couched in scientific terms, and particularly in what-ifs that satisfy even the most stringent demands for conservative thinking.
Rhapso 2y ago
More than that, "singularity" isn't even an exciting term. It is a boundary beyond which the model being used obviously cannot predict behavior. I personally think the singularity happened back in the 90s and its just been very disappointing instead of the rapture that was imagined.
- MarkusQ 2y ago
  You could put it anywhere you like; our ability to forecast the future has been rubbish for thousands of years. Some of my favorites: 2019, 2000, 1992, 1969, 1928, 1900, mid 1700s, ~400 BCE, ~5000 BP, ~11000 BPE.
  - ben_w 2y ago
    This is why I tend to phrase it as an "event horizon" rather than a "singularity" (well, this and to avoid the baggage). There's always been some stuff we can't forecast, and some other stuff we can forecast kinda OK-ish. If you'd asked people from 11000 BPE if the sun would still be rising and crops would still be grown today, I suspect the biggest difficulty would be finding someone who really understood the meaning of the number used to express the number of years between then and now — even a "big city" back then would have been order of 1k-2k people. But I say "sun" and "crops" because of what I expect to be the limits of their imagination. We see such limits even today — even on Hacker News, look at threads about AI taking over the world, and you will see people discussing AI as if it can only be in the form of existing current LLMs. So, the question to ask is: how far into the future would you have to take someone from each of those years, before they're shocked by what they encounter? That's my "event horizon", because it's the horizon beyond which you cannot see, even if that horizon is one of inability to predict what specific thing will be invented rather than the general trend-lines going infinite. The time-gap to a shocking new invention decreases as the rate of progress increases. Obviously how much some person will be able to forecast and hence not be surprised by, will depend on how much attention they pay to technological developments — and I've seen software developers surprised by Google Translate having an AR mode a decade after the tech was first demonstrated — but there is an upper limit even for people who obsessively consume all public information about a topic: if you're reading about it when you go to sleep, will you be surprised when you wake up by all the overnight developments? Personally, I've tried making my own forecasts about the future, I'm fairly consistent for the last decade that my models stop making sense around 2032. But even with that consistency, I could only see ChatGPT coming when InstructGPT was shown off in a Two Minute Papers video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m...) and the rate of change of Transformer and Diffusion models has continued to surprise me. (I also didn't predict how severely YouTube would be stuffed with adverts, but that's more of a cultural shift — everyone gets all "kids these days" as they get older, why would I be any different?)
zaphar 2y ago
The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events to a specific point in the future that will lead to some very religious sounding results: * Eternal life * A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong - An end to poverty - An end to disease * Personal Freedom This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.
- michaelgburton 2y ago
  The singularity in this context refers to the point beyond which predictions will fail because we cannot possibly foresee the consequences of certain technological changes. There's nothing historical about it; it came about as a result of a few different science writers looking into the future and wondering how we keep up in an accelerating technological context. I actually agree that it's become something else, but the origin of the term was what I was correcting, and its origin isn't something woo-woo, it's firmly based in scientific speculation.
  - simiones 2y ago
    Even in its original context, it's still a bunch of woo-woo. The core idea, that creating a technology that can improve technology will lead to exponential technological advancement that can be modeled as a mathematical singularity, is very hand-wavy and silly on its face.
    - michaelgburton 2y ago
      It's been very easy to observe acceleration in progress over time, and there's a natural question that emerges: Will we reach a point where people can't keep up? Nothing hand-wavy or silly there. And the discussion of the topic as it was formed in the second half of the 20th century was pretty carefully couched in terms of what-ifs and conservative projection.
kstrauser 2y ago
I agree. I believe in all those things, but in a sense that they seem inevitable, not as something I’m rooting for. The singularity, distilled, is that if/when we get AGI or other world-changing technology, accurately predicting what happens next is impossible. As the rate of technology advance increases, the interval over which you can make reasonable predictions shortens until eventually what happens tomorrow is a role of the dice. I believe in aliens in the same way: the universe is huge so I think they must exist because (small likelihood) x (huge number of chances) seems inevitable. I don’t think they’re flying over Idaho to terrorize farmers, though.

AlexCoventry 2y ago

I don't know; there was definitely an apocalyptic quality to the Singularity in Marooned In Real Time, and superintelligences in A Fire Upon the Deep were literally referred to as Gods (there's a brief reference to Applied Theology in there, IIRC.) So you could argue that there was at least an unconscious parallel to religion in the way Vernor Vinge saw the Singularity.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
That's hardly an unconscious parallel. That's a direct, atheist take. The whole attempt at casting transhumanism as religion is silly. Transhumanist side says, "there's no supernatural God, but sufficiently advanced technology could approximate it" - and then people turn around and say, "you see, you say enough technology is like a god, therefore you're religious and believe in God (specifically in Christian God per mainstream religion, with all its mores)". <facepalm> Like X != X.
- simiones 2y ago
  Religion and theism are orthogonal concepts. You can be an atheist and religious at the same time - many Buddhist sects are entirely atheistic, for example. Many cults are also atheistic. A good example of atheistic, even materialistic, religion was the official doctrine of the USSR, "marxist dialectical materialism". This had all of the hallmarks of a religion, complete with religious texts, priests, condemnation of non-believers, and so on - but caked in fully materialistic and dogmatically atheist concepts.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    In this sense, free market maximalism is a materialistic religion of its own. Still, this is not the framing that people calling transhumanism a religion use. The arguments are usually trying to show parallels between transhumanist beliefs/theories and theistic religious beliefs (almost always Christianity) - specifically to say, "look, it sounds like Christianity if you substitute AI for God and Singularity for Rapture, therefore this is just rebranded Christianity, not Science", therefore implying the transhumanists are wrong. The argument is, literally, "this pattern-matches to religion therefore must be just as wrong", and I'm saying it's a dumb argument.
michaelgburton 2y ago
Here's the Vinge paper most folks cite when talking about The Singularity. https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html There's a lot of speculation in there, but it's pretty carefully couched in scientific terms, and particularly in what-ifs that satisfy even the most stringent demands for conservative thinking.

Rhapso 2y ago

More than that, "singularity" isn't even an exciting term. It is a boundary beyond which the model being used obviously cannot predict behavior. I personally think the singularity happened back in the 90s and its just been very disappointing instead of the rapture that was imagined.

MarkusQ 2y ago
You could put it anywhere you like; our ability to forecast the future has been rubbish for thousands of years. Some of my favorites: 2019, 2000, 1992, 1969, 1928, 1900, mid 1700s, ~400 BCE, ~5000 BP, ~11000 BPE.
- ben_w 2y ago
  This is why I tend to phrase it as an "event horizon" rather than a "singularity" (well, this and to avoid the baggage). There's always been some stuff we can't forecast, and some other stuff we can forecast kinda OK-ish. If you'd asked people from 11000 BPE if the sun would still be rising and crops would still be grown today, I suspect the biggest difficulty would be finding someone who really understood the meaning of the number used to express the number of years between then and now — even a "big city" back then would have been order of 1k-2k people. But I say "sun" and "crops" because of what I expect to be the limits of their imagination. We see such limits even today — even on Hacker News, look at threads about AI taking over the world, and you will see people discussing AI as if it can only be in the form of existing current LLMs. So, the question to ask is: how far into the future would you have to take someone from each of those years, before they're shocked by what they encounter? That's my "event horizon", because it's the horizon beyond which you cannot see, even if that horizon is one of inability to predict what specific thing will be invented rather than the general trend-lines going infinite. The time-gap to a shocking new invention decreases as the rate of progress increases. Obviously how much some person will be able to forecast and hence not be surprised by, will depend on how much attention they pay to technological developments — and I've seen software developers surprised by Google Translate having an AR mode a decade after the tech was first demonstrated — but there is an upper limit even for people who obsessively consume all public information about a topic: if you're reading about it when you go to sleep, will you be surprised when you wake up by all the overnight developments? Personally, I've tried making my own forecasts about the future, I'm fairly consistent for the last decade that my models stop making sense around 2032. But even with that consistency, I could only see ChatGPT coming when InstructGPT was shown off in a Two Minute Papers video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m39s https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m...) and the rate of change of Transformer and Diffusion models has continued to surprise me. (I also didn't predict how severely YouTube would be stuffed with adverts, but that's more of a cultural shift — everyone gets all "kids these days" as they get older, why would I be any different?)

zaphar 2y ago

The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events to a specific point in the future that will lead to some very religious sounding results: * Eternal life * A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong - An end to poverty - An end to disease * Personal Freedom This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.

michaelgburton 2y ago
The singularity in this context refers to the point beyond which predictions will fail because we cannot possibly foresee the consequences of certain technological changes. There's nothing historical about it; it came about as a result of a few different science writers looking into the future and wondering how we keep up in an accelerating technological context. I actually agree that it's become something else, but the origin of the term was what I was correcting, and its origin isn't something woo-woo, it's firmly based in scientific speculation.
- simiones 2y ago
  Even in its original context, it's still a bunch of woo-woo. The core idea, that creating a technology that can improve technology will lead to exponential technological advancement that can be modeled as a mathematical singularity, is very hand-wavy and silly on its face.
  - michaelgburton 2y ago
    It's been very easy to observe acceleration in progress over time, and there's a natural question that emerges: Will we reach a point where people can't keep up? Nothing hand-wavy or silly there. And the discussion of the topic as it was formed in the second half of the 20th century was pretty carefully couched in terms of what-ifs and conservative projection.

kstrauser 2y ago

I agree. I believe in all those things, but in a sense that they seem inevitable, not as something I’m rooting for. The singularity, distilled, is that if/when we get AGI or other world-changing technology, accurately predicting what happens next is impossible. As the rate of technology advance increases, the interval over which you can make reasonable predictions shortens until eventually what happens tomorrow is a role of the dice. I believe in aliens in the same way: the universe is huge so I think they must exist because (small likelihood) x (huge number of chances) seems inevitable. I don’t think they’re flying over Idaho to terrorize farmers, though.