The Most Amazing Article I've Ever Read

[R_C]

Re: The Most Amazing Article I've Ever Read

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: johnnycakes</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Sorry R_C, I don't get the connection between the Matrix and the Singularity. Illusion vs reality? </div></div>

Well the movie invokes the possibility that in the future, ultra intelligent entities (presumably computers) will have the power to create their own version of reality. And that we will at some point have to choose which we wish to live in.

[johnnycakes]

Re: The Most Amazing Article I've Ever Read

<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: R_C</div><div class="ubbcode-body"><div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: johnnycakes</div><div class="ubbcode-body">Sorry R_C, I don't get the connection between the Matrix and the Singularity. Illusion vs reality? </div></div>

Well the movie invokes the possibility that in the future, ultra intelligent entities (presumably computers) will have the power to create their own version of reality. And that we will at some point have to choose which we wish to live in.

</div></div>


Okay Got it,

The question of what a super intelligence will do IF it achieves consciousness is totally up in the air. We're not going to know until consciousness arises in a machine intelligence.
I assume (big assumption) that machine intelligence assigned to a task will take the logical and most efficient route to accomplish any task and it will depend on the parameters, the limitations the programmers place upon it much as Asimov's robots were limited by the Three Laws set up within their brains and which when broken or even if the machine considered breaking would destroy the machine brain.

Movies on AI have some interesting concepts but usually and as illustrated in the film &quot;I, Robot&quot; they take great liberties with the original story and the actual science to make the movie more action filled and a bigger box office draw.

A menacing AI is far more exciting than a benevolent one.

Think about the difference in the computers in &quot;2001: A Space Odyssey&quot; and the more recent &quot;Moon&quot; (IMO one of the best science fiction films ever made).

[johnnycakes]

Re: The Most Amazing Article I've Ever Read

SmoothOperator:

I read Kurzweil's book, well it was more like a tome, The Singularity Is Near, several years ago. I thought it was interesting, but I think he is wrong. How convenient for him that the Singularity where humans achieve immortality arrives just in time for him. While I understand the concept it is a bit of wishful thinking that overestimates the speed of exponential technological growth and where we are in the cycle. Technologically speaking we are not even infants, but still in the womb and perhaps in a few hundred years if mankind has not yet wiped itself from the face of the earth or some natural disaster does not get us we will get there. But if he is right you may live to see it because according to him, incremental progress in technology will add years to human life so that even people in their 60s, as he is, will live to see it. Anyway someone should start a thread on this in one of the other forums.


SmoothOperator,

Kurzweill is 62 and the Singularity is due in 2045 at which point he'll be 96 or so and not likely that he'll live that long unless the life extending nanotechnology is operative before then.

I have read the chapter in the book on exponential technological growth and he is very careful to both neither overestimate nor understate that growth. He takes great pains to explain how that curve accelerates greatly in any exponential growth pattern and the consistency of that pattern.
We'll know sometime in the 2020's when we are supposed to hit the point of great acceleration whether his theory holds up.
The fact that he has been correct for the past twenty years and that so many very bright people are jumping on the Singularity and preparing for it is just one more reason I think it is valid.

Even if he is incorrect about where we are on the curve, the difference between what he is predicting and what will turn out to be real cannot be that large and there is not yet any evidence that he is wrong but as he says just our human intuitive clinging to the belief in the linear rather than the exponential growth of technology.

The fact that we are now working with computers which are already accelerating the speed of knowledge gathering and growth and which have accelerated the acceleration of the process is what I think puts us very close to that fast acceleration point on the curve.

All the thousands of years of learning comes to that rapid growth point, that result of exponential acceleration because we have the technology now to make it happen.

I understand your doubts and as I have not yet read many criticisms that I understand Kurzweill greatly relishes addressing and knocking down, I'll reserve final judgement on the date of the Singularity as Kurzweill sees it but not on the concept, not on the premise that we are still very close to the edge of that &quot;event horizon.&quot;

I do not expect to see it or benefit from it being just my luck to have been born a few score years too soon.
I greatly appreciate your input since you've read the book and have some idea of what it portends.

I remain somewhat perplexed that not many others are as enthused as I am about this but perhaps it is the wrong place for such a concept to be either appreciated or discussed in any meaningful way.
There is that doubt and skepticism that we atheists have for things that seem miraculous that perhaps carries over into the general population on things that are a bit more involved and either unlikely, unfamiliar or too far out from than the mundane subject matters most deal with on a day to day basis; that xenophobic discomfort of the unfathomable. Even Kurzweill himself said that he has problems trying to envision what follows the Singularity as far as the effects on humanity so I guess that would throw many people off.

I'll probably get and read the book this week and have a better grasp on the details at that point.

We'll talk.