6 ms·

It feels cultish, but it's not. It's the real deal. It's the real deal because there will come a time in the future when computers are "smarter" than people.

by pj 17y ago

It feels cultish, but it's not. It's the real deal. It's the real deal because there will come a time in the future when computers are "smarter" than people. Computer analytical skills will progress faster than human analytical skills. Computers will be asking humans questions. It's not a cult at all. You don't have to believe it is coming. You don't have to associate with people who do believe it is coming. It seems like a logical certainty to me. Unless there is some sort of a human intervention or tragedy that stops us from progressing and innovating and building more powerful computing systems, then what is the alternative? That humans continue to outpace computers forever? If you look around at the world already, most people have no idea what is going on with the internet, cloud computing, artificial intelligence. Robots are sweeping our floors and mowing our lawns and killing our enemies. What is the alternative? How might The Singularity not occur?

_debug_ 17y ago
> It seems like a logical certainty to me. ? What is the alternative? How might The Singularity not occur? Human intervention and refusal to allow it, as you already mentioned. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not necessarily a logical certainty. For example, if I could convince you (and with the same amplitude of conviction that you have right now towards a "smarter"-computer future) that such a future will inevitably result in the slavery of one man by another, and of ever-more powerful dictatorships (that call themselves democracies), this very thought would be the first step towards the non-conception of the singularity. I believe a person called Theodore Kacinzsky has previously argued along these lines, though he chose a more explosive form of argument than mere words :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski One alternative is to restrict research to biological advances that benefit humans (stem cell research, for example) rather than trying to create even-more powerful machine learning tools all the time. Just because "everyone" eats McDonalds, it does not take away the power of choice from you to never ever visit a McDonalds (for whatever reason), for example. Look at how scarily equipped are the police today, what things man has created for war (weapons that boil your invisibly from a remote distance), and you will understand that technology is fun as long it's not. It doesn't take a genius to look at each invention and decide whether it will most probably be used for the good or result in further loss of privacy and freedom. Two headings from today' ACM "TechNews" newsletter in my inbox are, "The Display That Watches You" and "Predictive Powers: A Robot That Reads Your Intention?". My reaction is : "Are you dumb? don't you see where this is leading?"
- JesseAldridge 17y ago
  Innovations in one field are inevitably linked to innovations in others. Do you really think it's possible to hold back technological progress? That effectively means restraining human ambition. Would that not require an extreme police state?
_debug_ 17y ago
I refer you to this paragraph from the Wikipedia by Mr.Kaczynski, which summarizes what I feel when I see people marching like lemmings towards our collective enslavement, especially those working on projects which directly invade our privacy, such as reading intention, following eye movements, etc; Don't they realize how these will be used by governments? "...who participate in a powerful social movement to compensate for their lack of personal power. He further claims that leftism as a movement is led by a particular minority of leftists whom he calls "oversocialized": The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people.[35] He goes on to explain how the nature of leftism is determined by the psychological consequences of "oversocialization." Kaczynski "attribute[s] the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions." He further specifies the primary cause of a long list of social and psychological problems in modern society as the disruption of the "power process", which he defines as having four elements: The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later.[36] [...] We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group.[37] Kaczynski goes on to claim that "[i]n modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives." Among these drives are "surrogate activities", activities "directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the 'fulfillment' that they get from pursuing the goal".[38] He claims that scientific research is a surrogate activity for scientists, and that for this reason "science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."
iron_ball 17y ago
What if it's impossible to develop an autonomous machine intelligence? I know that statement is equivalent to "what if it's impossible to develop heavier-than-air flight," and I think that we definitely should pursue AI research, but it is by no means guaranteed that we will end up with anything that behaves like a self-directed mind. I'm choosing my words here, because obviously a Singularity situation would not require a human-like intelligence. But as far as I know, neurologists and psychologists don't really know how human minds work, and computer scientists haven't built a computer mind that showed even a glimmer of "free will" or "self-awareness," if you'll pardon the terms. How can we take it for granted that we'll get there?
- khafra 17y ago
  The Singularity doesn't require computer sentience. Researchers at the Singularity Institute* refer to their goal as a "powerful optimization process."* All that's required is that it's better at general-purpose goal-seeking than humans; that would logically include the ability to wipe out the human race and tile the solar system with little smiley faces if we set its goal incorrectly. * http://www.singinst.org/ http://www.singinst.org/ * http://www.sl4.org/archive/0512/13006.html http://www.sl4.org/archive/0512/13006.html
  - iron_ball 17y ago
    And that's roughly what I meant by "self-directed." Imagine a concrete goal: efficient fusion power, for instance. It's easy to define, easy to establish success metrics, and it's even easy to propose methods -- but success has eluded us for decades. A mind that could solve a problem like that would have to have intuition, lateral and parallel thinking, and creativity (or their machine equivalents; I'm open to an AI which might think utterly unlike a human). My point is that we don't know where such traits come from in humans, and thus have no idea how to even begin to attempt to replicate them in computers except in the crudest and most rule-based ways. Note: I would dearly like to be proven wrong, I'm just parroting things I've heard.
- JesseAldridge 17y ago
  Not "if" but "when". There's nothing magical about the human brain. It's just a bunch of neurons. Eventually we'll be able to replicate it.
jganetsk 17y ago
If we all die tomorrow, the Singularity does not occur.

by pj 17y ago

_debug_ 17y ago

> It seems like a logical certainty to me. ? What is the alternative? How might The Singularity not occur? Human intervention and refusal to allow it, as you already mentioned. It could be a self-fulfilling prophecy, but not necessarily a logical certainty. For example, if I could convince you (and with the same amplitude of conviction that you have right now towards a "smarter"-computer future) that such a future will inevitably result in the slavery of one man by another, and of ever-more powerful dictatorships (that call themselves democracies), this very thought would be the first step towards the non-conception of the singularity. I believe a person called Theodore Kacinzsky has previously argued along these lines, though he chose a more explosive form of argument than mere words :) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theodore_Kaczynski One alternative is to restrict research to biological advances that benefit humans (stem cell research, for example) rather than trying to create even-more powerful machine learning tools all the time. Just because "everyone" eats McDonalds, it does not take away the power of choice from you to never ever visit a McDonalds (for whatever reason), for example. Look at how scarily equipped are the police today, what things man has created for war (weapons that boil your invisibly from a remote distance), and you will understand that technology is fun as long it's not. It doesn't take a genius to look at each invention and decide whether it will most probably be used for the good or result in further loss of privacy and freedom. Two headings from today' ACM "TechNews" newsletter in my inbox are, "The Display That Watches You" and "Predictive Powers: A Robot That Reads Your Intention?". My reaction is : "Are you dumb? don't you see where this is leading?"

JesseAldridge 17y ago
Innovations in one field are inevitably linked to innovations in others. Do you really think it's possible to hold back technological progress? That effectively means restraining human ambition. Would that not require an extreme police state?

_debug_ 17y ago

I refer you to this paragraph from the Wikipedia by Mr.Kaczynski, which summarizes what I feel when I see people marching like lemmings towards our collective enslavement, especially those working on projects which directly invade our privacy, such as reading intention, following eye movements, etc; Don't they realize how these will be used by governments? "...who participate in a powerful social movement to compensate for their lack of personal power. He further claims that leftism as a movement is led by a particular minority of leftists whom he calls "oversocialized": The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. [...] Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term "oversocialized" to describe such people.[35] He goes on to explain how the nature of leftism is determined by the psychological consequences of "oversocialization." Kaczynski "attribute[s] the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions." He further specifies the primary cause of a long list of social and psychological problems in modern society as the disruption of the "power process", which he defines as having four elements: The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later.[36] [...] We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group.[37] Kaczynski goes on to claim that "[i]n modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives." Among these drives are "surrogate activities", activities "directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the 'fulfillment' that they get from pursuing the goal".[38] He claims that scientific research is a surrogate activity for scientists, and that for this reason "science marches on blindly, without regard to the real welfare of the human race or to any other standard, obedient only to the psychological needs of the scientists and of the government officials and corporation executives who provide the funds for research."

iron_ball 17y ago

What if it's impossible to develop an autonomous machine intelligence? I know that statement is equivalent to "what if it's impossible to develop heavier-than-air flight," and I think that we definitely should pursue AI research, but it is by no means guaranteed that we will end up with anything that behaves like a self-directed mind. I'm choosing my words here, because obviously a Singularity situation would not require a human-like intelligence. But as far as I know, neurologists and psychologists don't really know how human minds work, and computer scientists haven't built a computer mind that showed even a glimmer of "free will" or "self-awareness," if you'll pardon the terms. How can we take it for granted that we'll get there?

khafra 17y ago
The Singularity doesn't require computer sentience. Researchers at the Singularity Institute* refer to their goal as a "powerful optimization process."* All that's required is that it's better at general-purpose goal-seeking than humans; that would logically include the ability to wipe out the human race and tile the solar system with little smiley faces if we set its goal incorrectly. * http://www.singinst.org/ http://www.singinst.org/ * http://www.sl4.org/archive/0512/13006.html http://www.sl4.org/archive/0512/13006.html
- iron_ball 17y ago
  And that's roughly what I meant by "self-directed." Imagine a concrete goal: efficient fusion power, for instance. It's easy to define, easy to establish success metrics, and it's even easy to propose methods -- but success has eluded us for decades. A mind that could solve a problem like that would have to have intuition, lateral and parallel thinking, and creativity (or their machine equivalents; I'm open to an AI which might think utterly unlike a human). My point is that we don't know where such traits come from in humans, and thus have no idea how to even begin to attempt to replicate them in computers except in the crudest and most rule-based ways. Note: I would dearly like to be proven wrong, I'm just parroting things I've heard.
JesseAldridge 17y ago
Not "if" but "when". There's nothing magical about the human brain. It's just a bunch of neurons. Eventually we'll be able to replicate it.

jganetsk 17y ago

If we all die tomorrow, the Singularity does not occur.