the discussion on the "just bugs me" part of the page pretty much settles in favour of singularity if we were to leave it at that, however I'm reasonably certain singularity as a doctrine or serious belief to replace religion or whatever you can think of won't be happening any time soon, the truth is that there's not particularly some sort of "will to survive" so much as a bunch of simple tasks that are ordered in a manner that can represent one, so for an AI to get a handle on these things it'd have to be programmed bit by byte to have specific tasks/functions/stuff it does that are based on certain criteria that are really simple... with some sort of ability to rewrite a lot of it's "surface" or "upper level" decision making processes, oh and luck
it also would need some reasonably good deeper processes, if you take humans for instance they're certainly not blank slates, they have extremely powerful drives to begin with, and learning takes a long period of time, we're still not sure what it is that makes a human brain truly different in it's processing than other animal brains although we're getting pretty far and it might be true that we'll get really far in the near future, it's also true that with globalization and the rise of the internet's prevalence we'll see a different world than ever before
but I don't think that means we're going to see brains in jars controlling robots as some sort of devolution fallacy-esque next stage of human evolution, species and life forms don't survive because of some sort of straight forward drive to survive, they live because the stuff they do *happens* to be good at making them survive and pass on their genes or whatever, not in a deterministic way that one would be able to tell but rather in a probabilistic way or something like that (to the degree that we can tell as of yet, although I personally think the universe is deterministic and that because we're not omnipotent we're allowed to treat it like it's not really most of the time because hey, whichever subjectivity based brain processes we've got going on, those are what we're mostly surviving and thriving on and a lot of the time it's safer to use those thanks to how evolution works, than something that is an objective claim although to be honest that's also due to evolution which just goes to show that evolution isn't perfect in that whole aryan race-myth sense of the word even if you could argue that since it's real it's technically perfect but that's getting into some hardcore philosophy that's offtopic I suppose and merely a technicality of semantics)
people tend to forget we come from the same genetic lineage as so every other species that overpopulates areas or makes a mistake in judgement, and you cannot make a perfect something out of imperfect things, you can probably do something better in ways you don't know about or how to consciously or even at all, but that's just you going to the limit of your knowledge and making a guess, aka "by accident or luck"
rather I'm pretty certain the event singularity fans are talking about is more of a societal process changing thing rather than a completely biological thing and the concept that we'll be "unrecognizable" is ludicrous, we have people who live in tribes who's culture is ruined by contact with us but only because they're not used to new things and don't have the right upbringing to deal with it, even in our own societies we don't necessarily have this, and families that maintain themselves often fall to various issues the previous generation or generations wouldn't have, such as alcoholism, there are some genetic factors but genes change apparently as you're still alive, they're not the basic building blocks of life entirely, genetic material is easily interchanged by bacteria much of the time
in short, any sort of change would be predictable based on a rough general understanding of evolution and it's premises, which don't include the pokemon style of evolution and don't cater to whatever they're talking about, besides... in the event a singularity type event happened what would *really* happen is probably biology and AI and logic and other things would catch up to the point where there's not *that* big a distinction between organic and inorganic material, the way borderlands says "RPG and FPS" alongside oblivion, let's say... there'd be differences but it'd be 45/55 to 55/45 or something ridiculous, I mean really already they define organic as
look up organic on wikipedia, you'll notice that in the sciences it's basically listed by composition, or by processes involved with the particular substance one's talking about
and there's even something called organic computing, named because it does to some degree, what an organism might be required to do, albeit as a program and not a living entity
don't forget that information itself is physical, it's made of electrons and the flow of them, your computer is what it is due to electricity flowing or not flowing at the right point in time, at the right location in the right amount, not some magical information that doesn't have any physical presence, and not solely by the existence of chips and hardware (otherwise it'd work while unplugged and unpowered)
hah, I hope that was a schooling for someone
also if moore's law says it doubles every 18 months then it doubles every 1.5 years
it's doubled 4/7 times, not 4/6 which means approximately once every 1.75 years, not 1.5 which is fairly significant, meaning it's not in perfect agreement
I'm ever amazed that singularity fans always ignore the existence of humanity in their notions of how a singularity will come about in the first place
oh, and dogs? dogs split from humans' ancestors at least a few million years ago, you're going to find that while people can get some "cybernetic enhancements" style stuff here and there, you're not even getting close to human level stuff, and even if you were, humans would by definition have to be able to comprehend these so called post-singularity transhumans, since they in fact, created them out of designs and aspirations, not random chance and a long segment of time, you don't make black boxes from scratch in a pervasive manner.... seriously, what?
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oh, and one more thing, that little quote about joan of arc? it might be because she was some sort of illiterate peasant or something, a lot of the stuff we've got in business, societal and political laws is pretty much echoed in some form or other by philosophers, rulers and a lot of the time is just what people think of on their own, there is a LOT of stuff that people just happen to come up with on their own, and most of the ignorance comes from a lack of experience in the general field or something of that sort, most of the famous scientists and so on were in the right place at the right time with their views, they weren't necessarily the ones with the best handle on reality which means quite simply that any idiot can understand something if they're lucky which says something about brains in general considering welsh corgies and german shephards are pretty intelligent as are primates and dolphins, and come on guys, this is TV tropes, you should know how much stuff gets reused generation by generation, INCLUDING theories of ascendance or heaven or rapture or whatever else you'd want to think about, why I seem to recall the plot of dragon age amounts to a magical variation of an attempt at singularity or something, and then there's the protoss in starcraft 2.... and then there's the whole "everyone is one big consciousness gestalt psychic thing" and the list goes on
handwaving with technology doesn't quite convince me
For me, Singularity is point of view, not milestone. For villager in Middle Ages, we are deep into Singularity. For caveman, Midde Ages would be Singularity. Dogs cannot fully comprehend human mind. And this goes on.
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Interesting thought, but i thought that a key concept of the singularity is transcending our biological and mental limits on a fundemental level (as opposed to saying, wearing glass, which does so to a lesser extent). Our technology is more advanced now than then, but neither of us have truly gotten to that point quite yet.
Wanted to reply to something said in the archived discussion:
- "(random passer-by): What if we already had the Singularity? What if humanity went through its period of apparent asymptotic scientific and technological development between 1940 and 1975, and now we're on the other part of the S-shaped curve, where we think we're getting closer and closer to that flying-car-and-silver-jumpsuit future, but never quite get there? Military aircraft topped out at Mach 2 plus a fraction. We went to the Moon forty years ago and haven't been back. Even CPU speeds have flattened out at a hair over 3 G Hz in the past 5+ years. What if we're not ever going to get flying cars, or O'Neill habitats at L-5, or cities on Mars? What if?"
Combat aircraft topped out at around Mach 2.5, but the experimental X-43 reached just short of Mach 10 in 2004. Mach number isn't really applicable to spacecraft, but the Helios 2 probe did the equivalent of around Mach 200 (~150,000mph).
Not returning to the Moon has more to do with lack of political will than technological ability. While manned spaceflight has stagnated, unmanned missions have gotten bolder and more successful by leaps and bounds, pioneering the use of ion propulsion and, recently, solar sails.
Gigahertz in CP Us refers to clock speed, not a true measure of performance. A better measure of true performance is instructions per second, which depends on a combination of the clock speed and how many instructions can be executed per clock cycle. A Pentium 4 at 3.2ghz from 2003 does about ten billion instructions per second; a modern Core i7 at the same clock speed does about 15 times that. That's about four doublings in about seven years, in perfect agreement with Moore's Law, which predicts doublings every 18 months. FLOPS, or Floating Point Operations Per Second, is another useful measure; in 2003 one gigaFLOP cost 82 dollars, while in 2009 it cost about 50 cents.
Flying cars are Awesome, but Impractical. You can build one from a kit for the price of a luxury sedan, but you'll need a pilot's license and an airport to fly it.
The exponential growth is continuing. It could end pretty soon (though I doubt that), but it certainly didn't end in 1975.
Edited by dysfunction
Accelerando by Charles Stross is listed under both Hard and Soft singularities. I don't know which to remove, since I haven't read it (or are there two in one book?)
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I like a challenge— "A group of merchants who sell what are basically very fancy abacuses was found guilty of illegally preventing other abacus merchants from fairly selling their wares."