

Singularity Objections - jkush
http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/12/27/sotala-mccabes-singularity-objections/#more-90

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jsmcgd
I always have time for a well reasoned argument even if it contradicts my own
view. These arguments are not well argued and they contradict my view. I
regret reading that article.

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hhm
I agree. Some of the arguments are even wrong. Specially: "Godel’s Theorem
shows that no computer, or mathematical system, can match human reasoning."
This is plainly false, in many ways. Gödel't Theorem says nothing about
computers (thanks to Turing we know we can't have an algorithm that solves
theorems, that was not Gödel's work and Gödel's work still allowed for that
possibility to exist), and in any case, we aren't sure our brains are just
Turing machines or not, so we can't say neither Gödel nor Turing proved
anything about the relative power of computers and human reasoning.

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jkush
_We might live in a computer simulation and it might be too computationally
expensive for our simulators to simulate our world post-singularity._

That's an awful lot of "mights".

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mynameishere
You know, I always figured that a computer-simulated world would have smart
compression techniques. Thus, the massive quantity of electrons flying around
necessary for a brain impulse, for instance, only "exists" when someone does
an MRI (or whatever tool they use for that sort of thing). Otherwise, a
reference to "pleasure" or "pain" is passed into the perceptions.

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byrneseyeview
So the Singularity is when we abstract out all the stuff that only exists to
trick us into thinking we've evolved from more primitive beings?

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marvin
More interesting is the lower paragraph which discusses objections to creating
a _friendly_ transhuman AGI, given that it is possible to create a transhuman
AGI. I am aware that singinst thinks a lot about these issues..is anyone aware
of any other organizations working with these things?

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mechanical_fish
For a far, far more entertaining take on the topic I recommend Bruce
Sterling's "The Singularity: Your Future as a Black Hole", available from this
page:

<http://www.longnow.org/projects/seminars/>

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nazgulnarsil
_Extrapolation of graphs doesn’t prove anything._

The induction fallacy is what allows humans to get up in the morning and make
decisions with incomplete data i guess.

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DanielBMarkham
You know, simulated universes might not exist simply to exist.

For instance, perhaps they are a form of communication? We could be just a
really complex story that one being is telling to another.

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xlnt
I sent him this objection:

We already build very powerful intelligences all the time, in the form of
children. But despite having a lot of raw computing power, they aren't very
useful without _knowledge_. They need to learn a lot of things before they can
live effectively, solve important problems, etc...

Artificial intelligence and intelligence are not fundamentally different
things. If you want AI's that turn out better than children do, you'll need
improved parenting and educational techniques, or an alternative. I haven't
seen any commentary on how singularity people plan to deal with this. And if
they could, why not just use that technique on human children and vastly
improve the world, now?

The main difference between AI and children I've seen proposed is that the AIs
can run on superior hardware. But it's not like people currently use all the
hardware resources their brain makes available; maybe that will be a
bottleneck in the future, but it isn't one we've hit yet.

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byrneseyeview
It is very hard to flawlessly copy a memory or concept into a child's brain.
This might be easier if we wrote the software and designed the hardware.

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xlnt
You think the input format will be easier for AI? I don't know. We have
evolved knowledge of the input format for children. Meanwhile the majority of
our knowledge is inexplicit, and we are bad at turning that into vague
English, let alone into something as precise as code.

Back to children, we're so good at teaching them that we manage to teach them
many inexplicit ideas without ever having much understanding of those ideas.

