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Paul Allen: The Singularity Isn't Near (2011)

95 points by rblion 14y ago

tocomment 14y ago
Is there any food that makes a substitute for bread on sandwiches? I've always wondered that. I think I could substantially reduce my carbs but I love sandwiches. Any ideas?
- tocomment 14y ago
  So sorry wrong window.
- jahmed 14y ago
  Lettuce?
- tocomment 14y ago
  Ok, I'm really curious why my post in the wrong thread has 6 upvotes?
jamespitts 14y ago
Extrapolating future-history is extremely difficult. You get into this mode where you extend the current set of capabilities and limitations until you hit an edge, and to get past it you invoke magic. But it is so enjoyable and useful to creatively extrapolate or generate history, if only to encourage us to sink our time and energy into pushing that edge.
spindritf 14y ago
My first thought when I saw the title was that Paul Allen has some patent and obtained an injunction against the singularity. Somehow I cannot bring myself to think about the whole idea (of singularity, economics of emulated minds, etc) seriously. Whenever Robin Hanson (of Overcoming Bias[1]) writes about it, I usually skip the page, even though his ideas are new and insightful. I also read some stuff from Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Less Wrong[2]) and again it's a great concept, he even wrote some cool stories about it[3], but despite all the emphasis on correcting own biases and other follies of the mind, feels way too much like some sort of techno, cyberpunk religion from the 80s. [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/future http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/future [2] http://lesswrong.com/about/ http://lesswrong.com/about/ [3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  I fear that one of the worst things religion did to people is to make them think that every hope of doing something amazing and making the world a better place is insane. People are afraid of great dreams, because they think it's religion. They think low of singularity-related stuff just because they pattern-match long life (and/or immortality) and superhuman intelligence with what religions promise and talk about. They shouldn't. Living longer, better, improving ourselves and extending our capabilities beyond what is currently possible is not faith-stuff; it is the dream of mankind at large, and we're building our technology to achieve that.
  - freshhawk 14y ago
    The best thing that religion did is show modern man the dangers of choosing faith over evidence. People don't call the singularity a religion because they want the world to be better or want to live forever or know more. Everyone wants that. They call it a religion because people believe this will happen in their lifetimes because they really want it to. They have faith and have shown no evidence. It's not about the belief in improvement, it's about the belief in prediction of a specific kind of improvement and a prediction of a timeline.
robbiep 14y ago
This whole thing (futurism, the (+-Not)singularity, what may one day come) is fascinating to me and clearly pretty much everyone. Getting aside from the pseudo-religious arguments which are often raised in objection (and, personally I believe legitimately), I think we are left with 2 options: 1) the Singularity is a real thing which will happen at some point in the future 2) Consciousness is not able to be crafted by man and the logistics of downloadable consciousnesses and infinately extendable lifespans are forever beyond us, and life will continue pretty much as it has since pre-history, with better technology making a 'richer' life a possibility for a greater and greater proportion of humanity. As much as I would hope for option 1) the question I feel needs to be asked is why have not other conscious beings (which logically must exist elsewhere in the universe regardless of the numbers you plug into the Drake equation) come to us in their flying robot suits? The complex interplay of neurology and computing is only in it's infancy, and I wait with bated breath at the advances we are making in our understanding..
- sixQuarks 14y ago
  This is a question that was bothering me as well. It seems like evolution will always eventually lead to a singularity, so why don't we see it all around us? Jason Silva has an explanation that I think could be on the right track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM&noredirect=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM&noredirect=1
- pixl97 14y ago
  why have not other conscious beings 1. We are the first, or we are the first to get close to the singularity in our light cone. or 2. Generating energies or over coming the challenges of even traveling close to the speed of light is hard. or 3. Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space. or 4. They have.
  - randallsquared 14y ago
    1. I hope. 2. It doesn't matter; the galaxy can be completely converted to computronium in around 10M years even at 1% of the speed of light. 3. Exponential growth is bigger than space. 4. ...or in a simulation.
swombat 14y ago
Be sure to read Kurzweil's well-argued response too: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-responds-dont-underestimate-the-singularity/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-respond... (imho, more convincing than Allen's).
- natural219 14y ago
  A classical example is the laws of thermodynamics [...] I'm not sure what is argument is here. The laws of thermodynamics are scientific laws because we can test them and repeat them in a laboratory. This is untrue of Kurzweil's LOAR as far as I understand the requirements to deem something a scientific law [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
- simonsquiff 14y ago
  One of Kurzweil's arguments in his response is "...the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome. And while the translation of the genome into a brain is not straightforward, the brain cannot have more design information than the genome" However the brain's design information is the genome, the laws of physics and a universe. You only have to look at protein folding, and the complexity of the resulting molecule and how that interacts with the rest of the world, so see how much complexity is there outside of the genome - and it's that complex end result that you have to simulate or replicate. He goes onto say that "..the amount of design information in the genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which pertains to the brain. That’s not simple, but it is a level of complexity we can deal with and represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world." As above, this is greatly simplifying the end result that you're trying to replicate - the genome is just the software that's running on the OS/hardware of the universe. To replicate that virtually we'd also need a virtual universe.
  - martinkallstrom 14y ago
    The virtual brain could use the real world, just as the real brain is. Just like the Google cars and Watson are doing.
jasonkolb 14y ago
Thank you, Paul, for speaking out against this cult. It's very hard for me, as a programmer, to take this idea of a singularity seriously. I know how all of the technologies that Kurzweil is banking on work at a very low level and I call bullshit that this is ever going to happen. It would require a type of software that simply does not exist yet, something akin to a self-programming software, and we are so far away from that that it might as well be cold fusion. I think it's much more valid to call the "singularity" the point in time when technological expansion started occurring at an exponential rate. Thus I would put the singularity at about 200 years in the past, right around the time the spinning jenny was invented, and right before the industrial revolution. Now there's a point in time that I can point to and say "something meaningful happened". This is complete pie in the sky stuff, and I'm extremely cynical that it's not just something that Kurzweil talks about to sell books and conference tickets.
- Symmetry 14y ago
  It's... rather odd to redefine a term in use so that it's very different from what everybody else in the discussion talking about. Also, exponential economic growth has been with us since the rise of homo sapiens, but what we saw 200 years ago was a drastic shortening of the doubling period. You can also look at the invention of agriculture as another increase in the rate of doubling, and talk about how ~human level AI might cause another decrease in the doubling period. This is, at least, how Robin Hanson thinks about these issues. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf
- dbaupp 14y ago
  Just a point that should be made in any discussion about the "Singularity": Kurzweil's isn't the only model/definition[1] of the Singularity, and some high-profile Singularitarians don't have a high opinion of Kurzweil[2] ("I've come to the conclusion that Kurzweil's worldview prohibits Kurzweil from arriving at any real understanding of the basic nature of the Singularity"). > I think it's much more valid to call the "singularity" the point in time [...] Isn't this just redefining the word "singularity", and so making the discussion about something entirely different? So it might be better to qualify that with "industrial singularity" and the one under consideration here is the "technological singularity". [1]: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools [2]: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0206/4015.html http://www.sl4.org/archive/0206/4015.html
bdr 14y ago
When "The Singularity Is Near" was first published, I asked Bill Gates what he thought of the book. He said "I don't know how near the singularity is, but I haven't heard any convincing argument why it won't happen". That seems like a more sensible position than the one offered by Allen in this piece. There is indeed a lot of uncertainty in the rate of progress. But Allen contorts that fact to say that the singularity isn't near. He offers three basic critiques: First, he points out that Kurzweil is extrapolating, and extrapolations can be wrong. This seems obvious. And it doesn't do much towards Paul's "isn't". Second, he says that software and hardware will have to keep improving, and that might not happen. Again, this seems intellectually equivalent to saying "you might be wrong". No evidence is provided that progress will slow. Third, he says that the singularity will require either a bottom-up biologically inspired model, or a non-biologically inspired "AI" system. The complexity of the former will take a long time to overcome. Since Allen concedes that sufficient computational power is already here, he seems to be arguing that it will take over a hundred years for us to have a detailed model of the human brain. Looking at the progress of science, this seems terribly conservative, yet little justification is offered. Allen's posited "complexity brake" seems positioned tendentiously — why are we going to start hitting it now, instead of fifty years ago? As for the AI route, he writes: "But when we step back, we can see that overall AI-based capabilities haven’t been exponentially increasing either, at least when measured against the creation of a fully general human intelligence." What does it even mean to be exponential relative to a binary variable? He is right to say that current methods are limited, and don't achieve generalized intelligence, but offers no reason why that won't happen. His argument seems equivalent to simply saying it hasn't happened yet. This piece offers little intellectual contribution, and the only reason we're reading it piece is because of the author. It reads like he started from the conclusion he wanted, and threw some paragraphs in that direction. His argument, essentially, is that he's betting against continued progress in science, software, and hardware. That just seems crazy.
- loboman 14y ago
  Just curious, in what context did you ask Bill Gates that?
- angersock 14y ago
  ( I don't believe Allen ever actually conceded the point you seem to wish to attribute to him, even after multiple readings. ) There's every reason to believe that things aren't going to get faster or better--CPU development seems to be petering out compared to the gains of yesteryear. Worse, the products that drive those sales, and the markets that drive those products, seem utterly uninterested in anything beyond simple apps and hardware-as-appliance. The thing a lot of people seem to forget is that the market is what drives this stuff, and that in the absence of market forces not very much happens. This is the world we live in.
kingkawn 14y ago
If you assume that a breakthrough is possible, and desire its occurrence, then you've got a subjective bias to find a way to logically predict it will happen within the bounds of your lifetime.
- sampo 14y ago
  Actually, some of the singularity people regard the singularity both inevitably happening soon(ish), and their worst nightmare. Not desirable at all. The superintelligent machines will take over the world and probably destroy humankind as a side effect. Consequently, they think that we urgently need philosophical musings over possible ways to ensure that the inevitably created superintelligent AI overlords would be build using principles that make them friendly to humankind. This is (according to them) the only hope to save humankind from extinction in near future.
  - kingkawn 14y ago
    I don't equate desire and positive outcome. Sometimes the waiting is worse than the thing itself. especially if you know it's coming.
Neuromorphism 14y ago
Hmm, Kurzweil joins Google -> Allen says Singularity is bunk. Looks like there has been an ongoing exchange, but funny that both items make the front page of HN on the same day...
- mtgx 14y ago
  It's almost like someone tries to discredit him or Google for hiring Ray Kurzweil.
- kristofferR 14y ago
  This is from 2011, so it had absolutely nothing to do with Kurtzweil joining Google.
jeremyjh 14y ago
I agree that there is no convincing evidence the Singularity is so near, but I don't agree with his central argument concerning the necessity of software engineering breakthrough requiring accurate models of human cognition. The AI and ML learning successes we've had the last decade aren't based on developing some kind of imperative algorithm for evaluating a specific problem domain. We don't need one for cognition either; we just need a machine that can learn how to learn better. That is really all the singularity is; unbounded recursive self-improvement.
seiji 14y ago
The quotes on their website are a hoot. First, there's a modal you have to manually dismiss: "Singularity University is acquiring the Singularity Summit from Singularity Institute." Then, such gems like "The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity. As we get closer to the Singularity, each year's conference is better than the last." They seem kinda obsessed with "thought leaders" and not so much "thought doers."
- dbaupp 14y ago
  "Their website" and "they". Who are you referring to? Edit: I guess Singularity Institute http://singularity.org/ http://singularity.org/ since the banners and text seem to match up, maybe? In any case, the news of the transfer of the summit is evidence against your last point. It means (I hope) that Singularity Institute is trying to free up their researchers to be able to concentrate on actual work, rather than organising a conference every year.
DannoHung 14y ago
I thought the singularity just meant that technological change was so rapid that it ceased to have meaning. I feel like we might be there today. I'm not sure what could be engineered tomorrow that would surprise me meaningfully. If someone says that they have a working fusion reactor, I'd just be like, "Geez, finally. What the hell took so long?"
dgregd 14y ago
This is discussion about intelligence. But do we have clear definition of intelligence? Without clear definition one can say that the Singularity already happened. Chess masters definitely are considered intelligent. So why computer programs which beat them aren't called super intelligent? Because they use brute force algorithms?
- dbaupp 14y ago
  Because the chess engines aren't sufficiently general purpose. http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimization/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimizatio... tries to address questions like the ones you ask. (Obviously the definition proposed there of "efficient cross-domain optimisation" isn't the definition of the word "intelligence", because no such thing can exist, but it is a definition that seems to match with our intuitions well.)
- hpvic03 14y ago
  I think when intelligence is mentioned in these discussions it is implicitly defined as "being reasonably capable of doing everything a human can." However, intelligence can also be defined as "the ability to maximize a risk/reward function." In this case, Kurzweil and Allen aren't referring to a specific function, so the first definition supersedes this second, more precise definition.
melling 14y ago
I can't say that I ever bought into the singularity by 2045. Things always take longer than expected. When I was a kid, I always thought that technology in 2001 would be incredible. As it stands now, the US doesn't even have a manned space vehicle. Anyway, the one good thing that could come out of the Singularity discussion is maybe we can have a concerted effort to make it happen. A lot more research money into big science, for example. Hypersonic flight, maglev trains, the Texas supercollider, space exploration, medical research, clean energy, etc. Imagine if the the first flight happen 100 years before the Wright Brothers, or the telephone had been invented even 50 years earlier. We might not have a Singularity by 2045, but we can actively accelerate our quest for knowledge.
- colomon 14y ago
  The technology in (real world) 2001 was incredible. But all the progress was in computers and communication, not travel. Back in the 20th century, every looked at the incredible advances in travel technology from 1850-1950 and assumed the growth curve would just keep on going. But it didn't; it peaked out somewhere in the 1970s. Since then it's gotten cheaper, but not faster. I think the Singularity is the exact same sort of projection. Progress in computer technology was incredibly fast from 1970 to 2000. My phone has a processor thousands of times faster than my first computer, back in 1982. And if progress continued at that rate, the Singularity probably would be inevitable. But it hasn't. My desktop computer today is not significantly more powerful than the machine I had in 2007. My laptop is much better than my laptop then, but it's only on par with my 2007 desktop. My phone is insanely better than my 2007 phone. The current trend is for computing power to get smaller and cheaper, rather than getting more computing power. That's great, but I don't see it getting us to the Singularity anytime soon.
  - pemulis 14y ago
    > The current trend is for computing power to get smaller and cheaper, rather than getting more computing power. I think it's a mistake to compare specific devices from different eras, like a 2007 desktop and a 2012 desktop. In order to find total computing power, you need to add your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, and cloud services together. When you do that, you see that we all have far more computing power than we did in the past, but we've chosen to spread that power over a variety of different devices.
swalsh 14y ago
I would suppose that by 2045 we might technologically be capable of "the singularity" but i'm not convinced we'd be socially accepting of a singularity. The old saying, the future is today its just not evenly distributed will still apply 30 years from now. If you could quantify social progress, I would theorize that it would be a linear growth. Which means, our capability, and how it fits in our society are becoming decoupled from each other at an increasing amount every year.
michaelochurch 14y ago
I'm fairly skeptical of a near-term singularity, but he provided no evidence that technical growth isn't exponential. Exponential doesn't mean "fast". He established that problems that were once impossible are still very difficult. Economic growth is faster than exponential. We see increasingly rapid growth at any point in time: pre-Cambrian vs. post-Cambrian evolutionary, pre-mammalian vs. mammalian, evolutionary vs. paleolithic, pre-agrarian vs. agrarian, agrarian vs. industrial. I don't think we're going to see a "Singularity" in 2045. We might see 10-50% annual economic growth by then. That wouldn't surprise me. At this point, we're probably making serious in-roads on a wide variety of health problems, and life expectancy at birth will probably be over 85 and may be undefined. I think it's a good bet that someone born in 2045 will see 3000, not because of a Singularity, but because such a person won't even begin to experience old age until the 22nd century.
- tbenst 14y ago
  Student of Applied Mathematics - Economics here. I took a class with Oded Galor, the primary proponent of Unified growth theory [1], a single model that describes the transition from the Maltusian trap [2] to an era of rapid growth, and finally a transition to a sustained growth regime. According to this economic growth model, the United States has already reached the sustained growth regime - meaning that we can expect continued growth of, say, 1-2% for eternity. Economic growth is NOT faster than exponential in a sustained growth steady-state. Do some googling for long-term economic forecasts, and you will find much research that supports low single-percent growth for the 21st century [3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap [3] http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/11/economic-outlook http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/11/economic-o...
charlieflowers 14y ago
Can anyone point me to information about this question: "What have we done to discover and understand the differences between human and animal brains, to see what accounts for the vast difference in intelligence?" I'm sure I could find a lot by Googling, but asking this group seems to be a more efficient way to benefit from some curation.
- ansible 14y ago
  Well, a starting place is to just read about the structure of the human brain on Wikipedia, versus that of other mammals. One of the key differences is just the size of the human brain compared to body mass.
- Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
  I know there is a lot of on-going research in learning the 'operating system' of the brain across quite a few animal models. In rats, mice, and monkeys, a lab where I work looks at the neuron level while these animals learn behavioral tasks. Classic behavioral tasks are merging with basic neuroscience and advanced imaging, with the help of computing. At the neuron level, we are still at very immature levels of understanding, but the path and direction being taken looks very promising.
reasonattlm 14y ago
http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p... I am prepared to go out on a limb here, as I have done before, and say that business and research cycles that involve standard-issue humans are incompressible beneath a certain duration - they cannot be made to happen much faster than is possible today. Kurzweil's Singularity is a Vingean slow burn across a decade, driven by recursively self-improving AI, enhanced human intelligence and the merger of the two. Interestingly, Kurzweil employs much the same arguments against a hard takeoff scenario - in which these processes of self-improvement in AI occur in a matter of hours or days - as I am employing against his proposed timescale: complexity must be managed and there are limits as to how fast this can happen. But artificial intelligence, or improved human intelligence, most likely through machine enhancement, is at the heart of the process. Intelligence can be thought of as the capacity for dealing with complexity; if we improve this capacity, then all the old limits we worked within can be pushed outwards. We don't need to search for keys to complexity if we can manage the complexity directly. Once the process of intelligence enhancement begins in earnest, then we can start to talk about compressing business cycles that existed due to the limits of present day human workers, individually and collectively. Until we start pushing these limits, we're still stuck with the slow human organizational friction, limits on complexity management, and a limit on exponential growth. Couple this with slow progress towards both organizational efficiency and the development of general artificial intelligence, and this is why I believe that Kurzweil is optimistic by at least a decade or two.
troymc 14y ago
Note: The linked article was published in October 2011. It's not exactly news, but does make for stimulating reading!
DaniFong 14y ago
Here's a probably important proposition that Peter Thiel and Garry Kasparov have been putting forward, and I have yet to see engaged with and answered: If we are truly accelerating technologically, why have the exponential gains in wages and PPP in the developed world largely stopped? They have hardly kept up with inflation. Compare 1891 - 1931, 1931 - 1971, and 1971 - 2011. People point to improvements in computer technology -- why have they not yielded significant improvements in the world of stuff? There has not been the expected productivity increase at all.
- cma 14y ago
  Beyond basic subsistence, most things we produce are status symbols that have zero net-effect--guy A's status goes up as a result of his purchase, guy B's status goes down.
- yk 14y ago
  The way I think about this, you have to correct for 'technological deflation.' What I mean by this is, if you only think about monetary loss of purchase power, then you will probably conclude that an iPhone costs something like $500 ( 2000 dollars). However to actually buy an iPhone in 2000 you would need to spend several billions and delivery would take something like ten years. ( Most of this is developing processors and displays that can power an iPhone.) Another example would be flat screens, there were some in 2000 (about as expensive as a car). So you don't see this increase in wages, simply because you are comparing against a moving target.
  - DaniFong 14y ago
    If that were the case, and computing technology were part of the PPP goods bundle, wages would be seen as going UP. The question is, if you subtract computers, why do you not see any improvement? Is this not evidence of a technological slowdown, at least in the world of stuff?
    - yk 14y ago
      My impression is, that the world of stuff moves slower but is moving. ( But I do not have some nice data to back this up, but cars are more fuel efficent, airline tickets decrease in price etc.) And atop of this you get a lot of 'add a computer' inventions. For example (non mobile) phones which store addresses.
crazygringo 14y ago
I would upvote this a million times if I could. The whole concept of the "Singularity" confuses hardware with software. Yes, hardware technology has followed an exponential rate of improvement, and there's no obvious reason to believe that will stop. But software certainly hasn't. Programmers today still deal with the same issues they dealt with 30 years ago. Separately, we've figured out some cool pattern-recognition techniques, but there's absolutely nothing indicating "exponential" growth in how smart our programs are. Yet the "Singularity" depends primarily on software, not hardware. And all this talk about getting around it by just "scanning in" actual brains and simulating them on hardware... well that still doesn't show how those simulated brains are suddenly going to get smarter than our own. (And then you've got a whole lot of human-rights and personhood issues when you start dealing with actual seemingly conscious brains running on silicon, with real childhood memories, real emotional desires and whatnot -- I mean, they would basically be actual people, not some kind of abstract AWS brainpower cluster...)
- bloaf 14y ago
  I'm not sure that the software/hardware break is as clear cut as that: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-b...
  - crazygringo 14y ago
    Kurzweil makes the same point in his rebuttal. But all he (and the article) is talking about is speed improvements to algorithms. Singularity-type AI is not about the speed, and it's not about complexity in terms of number of moving parts either (a million-line code base might be larger than a 10,000-line one, and more complicated, but not necessarily any more conceptually complex). What matters for the "Singularity" is conceptual improvements. We're still writing brittle computer code that crashes a compiler upon a single slightly misspelled constant name or missing comma, where the intention would still be crystal-clear to any human programmer. I don't see any kind of "exponential" progress whatsoever relating to the fundamental building blocks of artificial thought, which is what the entire "Singularity" premise is based on.
olefoo 14y ago
Thesis: The singularity must be prevented at all costs. Evidence: The increasing uselessness of human beings to economic activity. Evidence: The callousness to economic externalities with biological consequences of existing suprahuman organisms. i.e. Monsanto, Dupont, Keystone XL, the US Government Conclusion: The singularity would most likely result in the complete extinction of biological human beings. Nota Bene: Structured like a High School debate contrapositive because that's what the singularity always sounds like.
teeja 14y ago
"The singularity isn't near". Only became obvious when Kurzweil signed with Google???
meric 14y ago
It's only 32 years until 2045. 32 years ago was 1980. Emacs was first released in 1976. Lisa with its mouse and GUI was first developed in 1978. The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated in 1973. The TCP/IP protocol was first standardized in 1982. Thirty years on we're still relying on the same core technologies, though more mature. What new technologies have appeared in recent years that will become more mature in 5, 10, 20, 30 years?

95 points by rblion 14y ago

Is there any food that makes a substitute for bread on sandwiches? I've always wondered that. I think I could substantially reduce my carbs but I love sandwiches. Any ideas?

tocomment 14y ago
So sorry wrong window.
jahmed 14y ago
Lettuce?
tocomment 14y ago
Ok, I'm really curious why my post in the wrong thread has 6 upvotes?

jamespitts 14y ago

Extrapolating future-history is extremely difficult. You get into this mode where you extend the current set of capabilities and limitations until you hit an edge, and to get past it you invoke magic. But it is so enjoyable and useful to creatively extrapolate or generate history, if only to encourage us to sink our time and energy into pushing that edge.

spindritf 14y ago

My first thought when I saw the title was that Paul Allen has some patent and obtained an injunction against the singularity. Somehow I cannot bring myself to think about the whole idea (of singularity, economics of emulated minds, etc) seriously. Whenever Robin Hanson (of Overcoming Bias[1]) writes about it, I usually skip the page, even though his ideas are new and insightful. I also read some stuff from Eliezer Yudkowsky (of Less Wrong[2]) and again it's a great concept, he even wrote some cool stories about it[3], but despite all the emphasis on correcting own biases and other follies of the mind, feels way too much like some sort of techno, cyberpunk religion from the 80s. [1] http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/future http://www.overcomingbias.com/tag/future [2] http://lesswrong.com/about/ http://lesswrong.com/about/ [3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/qk/that_alien_message/

TeMPOraL 14y ago
I fear that one of the worst things religion did to people is to make them think that every hope of doing something amazing and making the world a better place is insane. People are afraid of great dreams, because they think it's religion. They think low of singularity-related stuff just because they pattern-match long life (and/or immortality) and superhuman intelligence with what religions promise and talk about. They shouldn't. Living longer, better, improving ourselves and extending our capabilities beyond what is currently possible is not faith-stuff; it is the dream of mankind at large, and we're building our technology to achieve that.
- freshhawk 14y ago
  The best thing that religion did is show modern man the dangers of choosing faith over evidence. People don't call the singularity a religion because they want the world to be better or want to live forever or know more. Everyone wants that. They call it a religion because people believe this will happen in their lifetimes because they really want it to. They have faith and have shown no evidence. It's not about the belief in improvement, it's about the belief in prediction of a specific kind of improvement and a prediction of a timeline.

robbiep 14y ago

This whole thing (futurism, the (+-Not)singularity, what may one day come) is fascinating to me and clearly pretty much everyone. Getting aside from the pseudo-religious arguments which are often raised in objection (and, personally I believe legitimately), I think we are left with 2 options: 1) the Singularity is a real thing which will happen at some point in the future 2) Consciousness is not able to be crafted by man and the logistics of downloadable consciousnesses and infinately extendable lifespans are forever beyond us, and life will continue pretty much as it has since pre-history, with better technology making a 'richer' life a possibility for a greater and greater proportion of humanity. As much as I would hope for option 1) the question I feel needs to be asked is why have not other conscious beings (which logically must exist elsewhere in the universe regardless of the numbers you plug into the Drake equation) come to us in their flying robot suits? The complex interplay of neurology and computing is only in it's infancy, and I wait with bated breath at the advances we are making in our understanding..

sixQuarks 14y ago
This is a question that was bothering me as well. It seems like evolution will always eventually lead to a singularity, so why don't we see it all around us? Jason Silva has an explanation that I think could be on the right track: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM&noredirect=1 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQOyJUDTKdM&noredirect=1
pixl97 14y ago
why have not other conscious beings 1. We are the first, or we are the first to get close to the singularity in our light cone. or 2. Generating energies or over coming the challenges of even traveling close to the speed of light is hard. or 3. Space is big. You just won’t believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the drug store, but that’s just peanuts to space. or 4. They have.
- randallsquared 14y ago
  1. I hope. 2. It doesn't matter; the galaxy can be completely converted to computronium in around 10M years even at 1% of the speed of light. 3. Exponential growth is bigger than space. 4. ...or in a simulation.

swombat 14y ago

Be sure to read Kurzweil's well-argued response too: http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-responds-dont-underestimate-the-singularity/ http://www.technologyreview.com/view/425818/kurzweil-respond... (imho, more convincing than Allen's).

natural219 14y ago
A classical example is the laws of thermodynamics [...] I'm not sure what is argument is here. The laws of thermodynamics are scientific laws because we can test them and repeat them in a laboratory. This is untrue of Kurzweil's LOAR as far as I understand the requirements to deem something a scientific law [1]. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_law
simonsquiff 14y ago
One of Kurzweil's arguments in his response is "...the design of the brain (like the rest of the body) is contained in the genome. And while the translation of the genome into a brain is not straightforward, the brain cannot have more design information than the genome" However the brain's design information is the genome, the laws of physics and a universe. You only have to look at protein folding, and the complexity of the resulting molecule and how that interacts with the rest of the world, so see how much complexity is there outside of the genome - and it's that complex end result that you have to simulate or replicate. He goes onto say that "..the amount of design information in the genome is about 50 million bytes, roughly half of which pertains to the brain. That’s not simple, but it is a level of complexity we can deal with and represents less complexity than many software systems in the modern world." As above, this is greatly simplifying the end result that you're trying to replicate - the genome is just the software that's running on the OS/hardware of the universe. To replicate that virtually we'd also need a virtual universe.
- martinkallstrom 14y ago
  The virtual brain could use the real world, just as the real brain is. Just like the Google cars and Watson are doing.

jasonkolb 14y ago

Thank you, Paul, for speaking out against this cult. It's very hard for me, as a programmer, to take this idea of a singularity seriously. I know how all of the technologies that Kurzweil is banking on work at a very low level and I call bullshit that this is ever going to happen. It would require a type of software that simply does not exist yet, something akin to a self-programming software, and we are so far away from that that it might as well be cold fusion. I think it's much more valid to call the "singularity" the point in time when technological expansion started occurring at an exponential rate. Thus I would put the singularity at about 200 years in the past, right around the time the spinning jenny was invented, and right before the industrial revolution. Now there's a point in time that I can point to and say "something meaningful happened". This is complete pie in the sky stuff, and I'm extremely cynical that it's not just something that Kurzweil talks about to sell books and conference tickets.

Symmetry 14y ago
It's... rather odd to redefine a term in use so that it's very different from what everybody else in the discussion talking about. Also, exponential economic growth has been with us since the rise of homo sapiens, but what we saw 200 years ago was a drastic shortening of the doubling period. You can also look at the invention of agriculture as another increase in the rate of doubling, and talk about how ~human level AI might cause another decrease in the doubling period. This is, at least, how Robin Hanson thinks about these issues. http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf http://hanson.gmu.edu/longgrow.pdf
dbaupp 14y ago
Just a point that should be made in any discussion about the "Singularity": Kurzweil's isn't the only model/definition[1] of the Singularity, and some high-profile Singularitarians don't have a high opinion of Kurzweil[2] ("I've come to the conclusion that Kurzweil's worldview prohibits Kurzweil from arriving at any real understanding of the basic nature of the Singularity"). > I think it's much more valid to call the "singularity" the point in time [...] Isn't this just redefining the word "singularity", and so making the discussion about something entirely different? So it might be better to qualify that with "industrial singularity" and the one under consideration here is the "technological singularity". [1]: http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools [2]: http://www.sl4.org/archive/0206/4015.html http://www.sl4.org/archive/0206/4015.html

bdr 14y ago

When "The Singularity Is Near" was first published, I asked Bill Gates what he thought of the book. He said "I don't know how near the singularity is, but I haven't heard any convincing argument why it won't happen". That seems like a more sensible position than the one offered by Allen in this piece. There is indeed a lot of uncertainty in the rate of progress. But Allen contorts that fact to say that the singularity isn't near. He offers three basic critiques: First, he points out that Kurzweil is extrapolating, and extrapolations can be wrong. This seems obvious. And it doesn't do much towards Paul's "isn't". Second, he says that software and hardware will have to keep improving, and that might not happen. Again, this seems intellectually equivalent to saying "you might be wrong". No evidence is provided that progress will slow. Third, he says that the singularity will require either a bottom-up biologically inspired model, or a non-biologically inspired "AI" system. The complexity of the former will take a long time to overcome. Since Allen concedes that sufficient computational power is already here, he seems to be arguing that it will take over a hundred years for us to have a detailed model of the human brain. Looking at the progress of science, this seems terribly conservative, yet little justification is offered. Allen's posited "complexity brake" seems positioned tendentiously — why are we going to start hitting it now, instead of fifty years ago? As for the AI route, he writes: "But when we step back, we can see that overall AI-based capabilities haven’t been exponentially increasing either, at least when measured against the creation of a fully general human intelligence." What does it even mean to be exponential relative to a binary variable? He is right to say that current methods are limited, and don't achieve generalized intelligence, but offers no reason why that won't happen. His argument seems equivalent to simply saying it hasn't happened yet. This piece offers little intellectual contribution, and the only reason we're reading it piece is because of the author. It reads like he started from the conclusion he wanted, and threw some paragraphs in that direction. His argument, essentially, is that he's betting against continued progress in science, software, and hardware. That just seems crazy.

loboman 14y ago
Just curious, in what context did you ask Bill Gates that?
angersock 14y ago
( I don't believe Allen ever actually conceded the point you seem to wish to attribute to him, even after multiple readings. ) There's every reason to believe that things aren't going to get faster or better--CPU development seems to be petering out compared to the gains of yesteryear. Worse, the products that drive those sales, and the markets that drive those products, seem utterly uninterested in anything beyond simple apps and hardware-as-appliance. The thing a lot of people seem to forget is that the market is what drives this stuff, and that in the absence of market forces not very much happens. This is the world we live in.

kingkawn 14y ago

If you assume that a breakthrough is possible, and desire its occurrence, then you've got a subjective bias to find a way to logically predict it will happen within the bounds of your lifetime.

sampo 14y ago
Actually, some of the singularity people regard the singularity both inevitably happening soon(ish), and their worst nightmare. Not desirable at all. The superintelligent machines will take over the world and probably destroy humankind as a side effect. Consequently, they think that we urgently need philosophical musings over possible ways to ensure that the inevitably created superintelligent AI overlords would be build using principles that make them friendly to humankind. This is (according to them) the only hope to save humankind from extinction in near future.
- kingkawn 14y ago
  I don't equate desire and positive outcome. Sometimes the waiting is worse than the thing itself. especially if you know it's coming.

Neuromorphism 14y ago

Hmm, Kurzweil joins Google -> Allen says Singularity is bunk. Looks like there has been an ongoing exchange, but funny that both items make the front page of HN on the same day...

mtgx 14y ago
It's almost like someone tries to discredit him or Google for hiring Ray Kurzweil.
kristofferR 14y ago
This is from 2011, so it had absolutely nothing to do with Kurtzweil joining Google.

jeremyjh 14y ago

I agree that there is no convincing evidence the Singularity is so near, but I don't agree with his central argument concerning the necessity of software engineering breakthrough requiring accurate models of human cognition. The AI and ML learning successes we've had the last decade aren't based on developing some kind of imperative algorithm for evaluating a specific problem domain. We don't need one for cognition either; we just need a machine that can learn how to learn better. That is really all the singularity is; unbounded recursive self-improvement.

seiji 14y ago

The quotes on their website are a hoot. First, there's a modal you have to manually dismiss: "Singularity University is acquiring the Singularity Summit from Singularity Institute." Then, such gems like "The Singularity Summit is the premier conference on the Singularity. As we get closer to the Singularity, each year's conference is better than the last." They seem kinda obsessed with "thought leaders" and not so much "thought doers."

dbaupp 14y ago
"Their website" and "they". Who are you referring to? Edit: I guess Singularity Institute http://singularity.org/ http://singularity.org/ since the banners and text seem to match up, maybe? In any case, the news of the transfer of the summit is evidence against your last point. It means (I hope) that Singularity Institute is trying to free up their researchers to be able to concentrate on actual work, rather than organising a conference every year.

DannoHung 14y ago

I thought the singularity just meant that technological change was so rapid that it ceased to have meaning. I feel like we might be there today. I'm not sure what could be engineered tomorrow that would surprise me meaningfully. If someone says that they have a working fusion reactor, I'd just be like, "Geez, finally. What the hell took so long?"

dgregd 14y ago

This is discussion about intelligence. But do we have clear definition of intelligence? Without clear definition one can say that the Singularity already happened. Chess masters definitely are considered intelligent. So why computer programs which beat them aren't called super intelligent? Because they use brute force algorithms?

dbaupp 14y ago
Because the chess engines aren't sufficiently general purpose. http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimization/ http://lesswrong.com/lw/vb/efficient_crossdomain_optimizatio... tries to address questions like the ones you ask. (Obviously the definition proposed there of "efficient cross-domain optimisation" isn't the definition of the word "intelligence", because no such thing can exist, but it is a definition that seems to match with our intuitions well.)
hpvic03 14y ago
I think when intelligence is mentioned in these discussions it is implicitly defined as "being reasonably capable of doing everything a human can." However, intelligence can also be defined as "the ability to maximize a risk/reward function." In this case, Kurzweil and Allen aren't referring to a specific function, so the first definition supersedes this second, more precise definition.

melling 14y ago

I can't say that I ever bought into the singularity by 2045. Things always take longer than expected. When I was a kid, I always thought that technology in 2001 would be incredible. As it stands now, the US doesn't even have a manned space vehicle. Anyway, the one good thing that could come out of the Singularity discussion is maybe we can have a concerted effort to make it happen. A lot more research money into big science, for example. Hypersonic flight, maglev trains, the Texas supercollider, space exploration, medical research, clean energy, etc. Imagine if the the first flight happen 100 years before the Wright Brothers, or the telephone had been invented even 50 years earlier. We might not have a Singularity by 2045, but we can actively accelerate our quest for knowledge.

colomon 14y ago
The technology in (real world) 2001 was incredible. But all the progress was in computers and communication, not travel. Back in the 20th century, every looked at the incredible advances in travel technology from 1850-1950 and assumed the growth curve would just keep on going. But it didn't; it peaked out somewhere in the 1970s. Since then it's gotten cheaper, but not faster. I think the Singularity is the exact same sort of projection. Progress in computer technology was incredibly fast from 1970 to 2000. My phone has a processor thousands of times faster than my first computer, back in 1982. And if progress continued at that rate, the Singularity probably would be inevitable. But it hasn't. My desktop computer today is not significantly more powerful than the machine I had in 2007. My laptop is much better than my laptop then, but it's only on par with my 2007 desktop. My phone is insanely better than my 2007 phone. The current trend is for computing power to get smaller and cheaper, rather than getting more computing power. That's great, but I don't see it getting us to the Singularity anytime soon.
- pemulis 14y ago
  > The current trend is for computing power to get smaller and cheaper, rather than getting more computing power. I think it's a mistake to compare specific devices from different eras, like a 2007 desktop and a 2012 desktop. In order to find total computing power, you need to add your phone, tablet, desktop, laptop, and cloud services together. When you do that, you see that we all have far more computing power than we did in the past, but we've chosen to spread that power over a variety of different devices.

swalsh 14y ago

I would suppose that by 2045 we might technologically be capable of "the singularity" but i'm not convinced we'd be socially accepting of a singularity. The old saying, the future is today its just not evenly distributed will still apply 30 years from now. If you could quantify social progress, I would theorize that it would be a linear growth. Which means, our capability, and how it fits in our society are becoming decoupled from each other at an increasing amount every year.

michaelochurch 14y ago

I'm fairly skeptical of a near-term singularity, but he provided no evidence that technical growth isn't exponential. Exponential doesn't mean "fast". He established that problems that were once impossible are still very difficult. Economic growth is faster than exponential. We see increasingly rapid growth at any point in time: pre-Cambrian vs. post-Cambrian evolutionary, pre-mammalian vs. mammalian, evolutionary vs. paleolithic, pre-agrarian vs. agrarian, agrarian vs. industrial. I don't think we're going to see a "Singularity" in 2045. We might see 10-50% annual economic growth by then. That wouldn't surprise me. At this point, we're probably making serious in-roads on a wide variety of health problems, and life expectancy at birth will probably be over 85 and may be undefined. I think it's a good bet that someone born in 2045 will see 3000, not because of a Singularity, but because such a person won't even begin to experience old age until the 22nd century.

tbenst 14y ago
Student of Applied Mathematics - Economics here. I took a class with Oded Galor, the primary proponent of Unified growth theory [1], a single model that describes the transition from the Maltusian trap [2] to an era of rapid growth, and finally a transition to a sustained growth regime. According to this economic growth model, the United States has already reached the sustained growth regime - meaning that we can expect continued growth of, say, 1-2% for eternity. Economic growth is NOT faster than exponential in a sustained growth steady-state. Do some googling for long-term economic forecasts, and you will find much research that supports low single-percent growth for the 21st century [3] [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_growth_theory [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_trap [3] http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/11/economic-outlook http://www.economist.com/blogs/buttonwood/2012/11/economic-o...

charlieflowers 14y ago

Can anyone point me to information about this question: "What have we done to discover and understand the differences between human and animal brains, to see what accounts for the vast difference in intelligence?" I'm sure I could find a lot by Googling, but asking this group seems to be a more efficient way to benefit from some curation.

ansible 14y ago
Well, a starting place is to just read about the structure of the human brain on Wikipedia, versus that of other mammals. One of the key differences is just the size of the human brain compared to body mass.
Lost_BiomedE 14y ago
I know there is a lot of on-going research in learning the 'operating system' of the brain across quite a few animal models. In rats, mice, and monkeys, a lab where I work looks at the neuron level while these animals learn behavioral tasks. Classic behavioral tasks are merging with basic neuroscience and advanced imaging, with the help of computing. At the neuron level, we are still at very immature levels of understanding, but the path and direction being taken looks very promising.

reasonattlm 14y ago

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.php http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2005/09/reading-the-sin.p... I am prepared to go out on a limb here, as I have done before, and say that business and research cycles that involve standard-issue humans are incompressible beneath a certain duration - they cannot be made to happen much faster than is possible today. Kurzweil's Singularity is a Vingean slow burn across a decade, driven by recursively self-improving AI, enhanced human intelligence and the merger of the two. Interestingly, Kurzweil employs much the same arguments against a hard takeoff scenario - in which these processes of self-improvement in AI occur in a matter of hours or days - as I am employing against his proposed timescale: complexity must be managed and there are limits as to how fast this can happen. But artificial intelligence, or improved human intelligence, most likely through machine enhancement, is at the heart of the process. Intelligence can be thought of as the capacity for dealing with complexity; if we improve this capacity, then all the old limits we worked within can be pushed outwards. We don't need to search for keys to complexity if we can manage the complexity directly. Once the process of intelligence enhancement begins in earnest, then we can start to talk about compressing business cycles that existed due to the limits of present day human workers, individually and collectively. Until we start pushing these limits, we're still stuck with the slow human organizational friction, limits on complexity management, and a limit on exponential growth. Couple this with slow progress towards both organizational efficiency and the development of general artificial intelligence, and this is why I believe that Kurzweil is optimistic by at least a decade or two.

troymc 14y ago

Note: The linked article was published in October 2011. It's not exactly news, but does make for stimulating reading!

DaniFong 14y ago

Here's a probably important proposition that Peter Thiel and Garry Kasparov have been putting forward, and I have yet to see engaged with and answered: If we are truly accelerating technologically, why have the exponential gains in wages and PPP in the developed world largely stopped? They have hardly kept up with inflation. Compare 1891 - 1931, 1931 - 1971, and 1971 - 2011. People point to improvements in computer technology -- why have they not yielded significant improvements in the world of stuff? There has not been the expected productivity increase at all.

cma 14y ago
Beyond basic subsistence, most things we produce are status symbols that have zero net-effect--guy A's status goes up as a result of his purchase, guy B's status goes down.
yk 14y ago
The way I think about this, you have to correct for 'technological deflation.' What I mean by this is, if you only think about monetary loss of purchase power, then you will probably conclude that an iPhone costs something like $500 ( 2000 dollars). However to actually buy an iPhone in 2000 you would need to spend several billions and delivery would take something like ten years. ( Most of this is developing processors and displays that can power an iPhone.) Another example would be flat screens, there were some in 2000 (about as expensive as a car). So you don't see this increase in wages, simply because you are comparing against a moving target.
- DaniFong 14y ago
  If that were the case, and computing technology were part of the PPP goods bundle, wages would be seen as going UP. The question is, if you subtract computers, why do you not see any improvement? Is this not evidence of a technological slowdown, at least in the world of stuff?
  - yk 14y ago
    My impression is, that the world of stuff moves slower but is moving. ( But I do not have some nice data to back this up, but cars are more fuel efficent, airline tickets decrease in price etc.) And atop of this you get a lot of 'add a computer' inventions. For example (non mobile) phones which store addresses.

crazygringo 14y ago

I would upvote this a million times if I could. The whole concept of the "Singularity" confuses hardware with software. Yes, hardware technology has followed an exponential rate of improvement, and there's no obvious reason to believe that will stop. But software certainly hasn't. Programmers today still deal with the same issues they dealt with 30 years ago. Separately, we've figured out some cool pattern-recognition techniques, but there's absolutely nothing indicating "exponential" growth in how smart our programs are. Yet the "Singularity" depends primarily on software, not hardware. And all this talk about getting around it by just "scanning in" actual brains and simulating them on hardware... well that still doesn't show how those simulated brains are suddenly going to get smarter than our own. (And then you've got a whole lot of human-rights and personhood issues when you start dealing with actual seemingly conscious brains running on silicon, with real childhood memories, real emotional desires and whatnot -- I mean, they would basically be actual people, not some kind of abstract AWS brainpower cluster...)

bloaf 14y ago
I'm not sure that the software/hardware break is as clear cut as that: http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-beats-moores-law/ http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/03/07/software-progress-b...
- crazygringo 14y ago
  Kurzweil makes the same point in his rebuttal. But all he (and the article) is talking about is speed improvements to algorithms. Singularity-type AI is not about the speed, and it's not about complexity in terms of number of moving parts either (a million-line code base might be larger than a 10,000-line one, and more complicated, but not necessarily any more conceptually complex). What matters for the "Singularity" is conceptual improvements. We're still writing brittle computer code that crashes a compiler upon a single slightly misspelled constant name or missing comma, where the intention would still be crystal-clear to any human programmer. I don't see any kind of "exponential" progress whatsoever relating to the fundamental building blocks of artificial thought, which is what the entire "Singularity" premise is based on.

olefoo 14y ago

Thesis: The singularity must be prevented at all costs. Evidence: The increasing uselessness of human beings to economic activity. Evidence: The callousness to economic externalities with biological consequences of existing suprahuman organisms. i.e. Monsanto, Dupont, Keystone XL, the US Government Conclusion: The singularity would most likely result in the complete extinction of biological human beings. Nota Bene: Structured like a High School debate contrapositive because that's what the singularity always sounds like.

teeja 14y ago

"The singularity isn't near". Only became obvious when Kurzweil signed with Google???

meric 14y ago

It's only 32 years until 2045. 32 years ago was 1980. Emacs was first released in 1976. Lisa with its mouse and GUI was first developed in 1978. The first handheld mobile phone was demonstrated in 1973. The TCP/IP protocol was first standardized in 1982. Thirty years on we're still relying on the same core technologies, though more mature. What new technologies have appeared in recent years that will become more mature in 5, 10, 20, 30 years?