
In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday - asnyder
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/13/business/13sing.html
======
thunk
The thing that scares me about the Singularity is that it's such potent kool-
aid for tech geeks. I talk to Singularitarians and there's this fire in their
eyes like they've been reborn. They become so certain. They remind me of
fundamentalists. If there's one thing more dangerous than a true believer it's
a crowd of really smart true believers. I'm afraid, perhaps unnecessarily, of
what might be done in the name of "ushering in the singularity".

I don't think we can know whether a singularity is possible until it's upon
us, which could be never. I'm singularity agnostic. That doesn't mean we don't
think hard about it. That doesn't mean we don't guard ourselves against its
perceived dangers. It does mean that we keep our heads and stay skeptical and
put out the fires that are already burning.

~~~
JoshuaZ
I'm not sure what could be done that would be dangerous in the name of
"ushering in the singularity." The worst plausible scenario is that we put
money into research avenues that don't pan out. But that happens all the time
anyways. The real worst case scenario is that someone gets too afraid of AI
and goes all Sarah Connor. But that's not a likely scenario especially because
most of the people who take the Singularity idea seriously are people who are
generally optimistic about the long-term trends.

~~~
randallsquared
_I'm not sure what could be done that would be dangerous in the name of
"ushering in the singularity."_

How about firing up a potentially runaway AI without a stable goal system?
Releasing a virus to "improve" people in the releasers' preferred direction?
The likelihood of these seems minor (and for the first, might not even been
possible), but the consequences are so grave that they bear some thought and
worry anyway.

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rms
Lots of confusion in the article, given a very complicated subject with widely
divergent opinions and the attempt for journalistic non-bias.

One thing that clears up some confusion is the important point that the word
"Singularity" means different things to different people.
<http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools>

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wheels
Here's one thing I've never gotten about singularity folks: why the assumption
that human ego / personality will persist into post-human evolution?

It's easy enough to buy into a reduction of the basic singularity tenants: a)
that we'll understand and be able to model the brain at some point, and b)
that at that point evolution can proceed on, well, non-evolutionary time
scales.

But it's always seemed to me like that step will have a tragic quality to it
as well: that's the day humans become just animals. I don't know why a post-
human intelligence would feel a need to preserve human individuals or the
human concept of self any more than we feel the need to preserve gerbil
personalities.

~~~
thunk
> _It's easy enough to buy into a reduction of the basic singularity tenants
> ..._

I don't even get that far. It may be the case that it's impossible to model
the brain to a sufficient level of detail to manufacture conciousness. It may
even be the case that our brains are doing something non-computable to produce
consciousness, in which case we have to give up on Turing-equivalent machines
entirely and move to something that more closely resembles our physical
brains. At that point Singularity-scale intelligence depends on the creation
of some big-brained biotech Frankenstein, which doesn't scale nearly as well,
and seems different enough to require a new name. We just don't know.

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ThomPete
I can't figure out if I like the article or not.

On one hand it's good to see that the subject get's into mainstream media.

On the other hand. The subject is dealt with quite simplistically. And the
focus on Kurzweil is giving the story a very one sided and kind of geeky don't
take too serious kind of angle.

I realize that even a newspaper like the NYT can't get too nerdy. But there
are far more important stories to talk about when it comes to transhumanism
even if the singularity doesn't happen. (I am personally skeptic)

I would though make one book advice that isn't following any specific school
of thought. Hans Movarec: "Robot - Mere machine to transcend mind"

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pavs
Its good to see Singularity getting more mainstream coverage. I think
Singularity is inevitable, but I don't agree with Kurzweil's timeline or the
fact that he is the face of Singularity. I understand that he wants to live
forever but that doesn't mean he has to sell over-optimistic theories.

Maybe people who takes his over-optimistic predictions seriously will work
harder to drive innovation?

~~~
moolave
That's probably why Kurzweil's son mentioned he is "less-weird" these days.
Just imagine being mocked for evangelizing futurists ideas that were thought
impossible are now surfacing into mainstream science. Of course, acquiring a
vast amount of knowledge from this Singularity training is absolutely rich. It
is only up to you whether or not you want to take the next step of tapping and
developing untapped technologies - even if society likes it or not.

------
rue
I have wondered, in a consciousness transfer scenario, if we can really ever
ascertain whether the consciousness is actually transferred or, as I fear is
the case, a new consciousness is created and the old one lost.

I assume someone has written a long treatise on the subject, but I have not
considered the subject pressing enough to actually research it.

~~~
philwelch
It's one of those weird philosophical questions. The sad part is, there's no
possible empirical answer--transferring my memories to a robot, the robot
would believe it was me and any test you could possibly devise would confirm
that the robot was me, but regarding my subjective experience inside this
soggy bag of meat, who knows whether that continues inside the robot or just
ends?

EDIT: Useful thought experiment from philosophy, devised during the time
Ronald Reagan was still alive. Suppose someone told you that they would take
you, erase your memories from your brain, upload Ronald Reagan's memories, and
then torture the inhabitant of your body. How willing are _you_ to say, "go
ahead! You'll just be torturing Ronald Reagan, not me!"? Personally, I'm not
so willing.

~~~
_delirium
For minor surgeries these days, like when I had my wisdom teeth removed, a
common combination is a local anesthetic plus a drug, midazolam, that
temporarily prevents forming new memories. Patients are conscious and
responsive during the operation, but don't remember being conscious; in
retrospect they remember it as if they had been knocked out with general
anesthetic. An odd thought experiment: if the local anesthesia hadn't worked
well and I was actually feeling pain, do I care in retrospect? I sort of
don't, I think, oddly enough. I don't remember it, so it doesn't really matter
to me either way. I mean, I wouldn't want to see a video of myself
experiencing pain, but so long as I neither remember it nor ever have to see
it, somehow it doesn't matter to me a whole lot.

~~~
philwelch
Well, yeah-- _after_ the fact, it doesn't really matter if you experienced
terrible pain that you didn't remember. But by that argument it's fine to
torture babies, since they won't remember it.

The question is whether, before the fact, you would go into minor surgery
without anesthetic at all knowing perfectly well that you would forget all of
the pain afterwards. Maybe you would if it was the best option, but I would
wince in anticipation.

~~~
_delirium
Yeah, I think I would wince at it, but I don't think I'd be _that_ opposed.
Somehow to me the idea of pain that I know up front I'll never remember isn't
all that frightening a prospect, though I suppose I'd still avoid it given the
option. It feels almost as if it's really just my body that'll experience
pain, not "me", in the sense that I won't remember anything about it, it'll
have no lingering traumatic effects, won't be an experience that'll do
anything to shape my personality, etc. I'd definitely be much less
apprehensive about it than if I knew I _would_ remember it.

~~~
philwelch
Hence the eternal philosophical problem with thought experiments (or
"intuition pumps" as some people call them)--different people have different
intuitions so maybe your thought experiment won't even make sense to them :)

------
lindbergh
I enjoy the idea of Singularity very much, but if this article is
representative of what this movement is all about (although it appears not to
be), it seems flawed to me. I had the feeling Singularity is oriented toward
biology, while I believe it should rather be approached by an anthropologic or
mathematical point of view. Besides, Intelligence is often mentioned, yet, has
it ever be defined correctly? My first guess would be that Intelligence is
only another word for the complexity of a given system. Thus, human
intelligence is only a representation of the complexity of our biological
system. Considering this, it is indeed inevitable that universe will be
saturated by intelligence, as universe is mathematically meant to keep
complexifying as «time» passes on.

That said, I have not read much about the subject, and I'd really enjoy some
serious text about this theory.

~~~
JeremyBanks
> ...universe is mathematically meant to keep complexifying as «time» passes
> on.

Doesn't it actually (within any closed system) do that exact opposite of that,
by the second law of thermodynamics?

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pigbucket
I found this article massively disappointing just because it drowns out the
central, important question (is technological progress really accelerating and
to what end?) in all this human-interest nonsense about the quaint fervency of
futurists like Kurzweil. Fervent belief doesn't always mean false belief, and
its not clear to me how the author has earned the right to this apparent
condescension. The article gives people who don't care to think about the
future consequences of present developments an easy out, which, when you think
about it, is a good way of helping to ensure that the very people we're
laughing at, and are slightly worried about, are left to follow their own
agenda.

~~~
hugh3
_its not clear to me how the author has earned the right to this apparent
condescension_

Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays?

If you ask me, condescension should be the default posture to adopt towards
anyone making wild, overconfident assertions based on flimsy evidence. Now,
since evidence about the future is awfully hard to come by...

~~~
pigbucket
_Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays?_

To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to
look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I
think you have earned it if you've already done the work necessary to
determine that a conjecture is wild and based on flimsy evidence. The author
of the article didn't do that work. I won't be seduced into conjecture about
the ellipsis, but evidence about the future is not so much hard to find (it's
everywhere in fact; it's the present state of things) as hard to interpret.
Still, there are lots of smart people working on predicting one or another
aspect of the future. Often they're wrong, so I share your skepticism, but
skepticism is different from denial or dismissal.

------
mikeleeorg
On a somewhat related note, here is a man with a bionic eye:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1424807>

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jimfl
It is telling that this article is in the business section and not the science
or technology section.

------
oldgregg
Sounds like eugenics, only the "undesired" population is humans.

~~~
pavs
Thats an over-simplification of what singularity is.

