

The Singularity Storms SXSW - ca98am79
http://techland.time.com/2011/11/21/the-singularity-storms-south-by-southwest-ray-kurzweil-lev-grossman-to-present-keynote-at-interactive-festival/

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md224
I prefer to interpret the Singularity as the emergence of a fused global
intelligence via the Internet and other networking technologies, rather than
some high-powered AI in a box. I can't figure out why this isn't the dominant
view.

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backprojection
Possible AI in a box is easier to understand.

Also, in order to build AI in a box, we need some better knowledge of how to
build AI, and it's not a stretch to see that in the future we may have this
knowledge.

What is/would be the theoretical underpinning of a fused global intelligence
via something like the internet?

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wlievens
> it's not a stretch to see that in the future we may have this knowledge

There's really no way to support that claim. We haven't made any tangible
progress at all towards strong AI in the past 40 years. We did salvage a lot
of really cool research projects on the side, but none of them even come to
close to suggesting how to build strong AI.

It's like saying that building a faster car brings you closer to FTL travel.
It doesn't, not in any real sense.

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exit
i don't know, we seem to make significant inroads into understanding every
other physical system we've encountered - why not the brain?

and "in the future" is a pretty broad time frame.

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disgruntledphd2
Arguably (and this is a pretty out there view in neuroscience) because in this
case, the instrument we're using to understand the physical system is itself
the object of study. Throws up some interesting self referential problems.

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exit
we might make sense of our cognitive routines without really grasping how
phenomenological experience arises. i still think that's enough for us to
build ai which is equally perplexed by the blueness of a blue sky.

