
Singularity Is Near Full Documentary Michio Kaku – Ray Kurzweil - t23
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CSNmrunCnA
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peterwwillis
Ah, the new form of conspiracy theory: the scientific/technologist tinfoil hat
group.

The thing that makes what these different people are talking about seem so
absurd is they pose theoretical situations, and ask "What If?", and then just
stop right there and don't critically examine the situation at all. All the
"What If?"s then drive a sort of nagging horror at all the possible negative
outcomes, and then you become Ray Kurzweil.

The biggest fallacy of the Singularity is the accelerating change hypothesis.
In order for accelerating change to work, you not only have to invent new
things, you have to adopt & apply them. Recently there was a story posted
about how it took hundreds of years after the discovery of stainless steel for
it to begin to be adopted by companies and individuals. And the reasons for
the lack of adoption are almost always due to one thing: limitation of the
human brain.

We still don't know much about the brain. As long as everyone's brain remains
stuck in this meatsack and evolves at a very slow rate, so will the social
adaptation of technological change and the investment therein. And that will
limit not only our ability to develop AI, but how and where we use it.

To me it's far more likely that a true AI will first be used to manufacture
cheerios than control a military weapons system, even though the military
weapons system is where the biggest dollar investment in AI will be. The
cheerios manufacturing plant will have a practical problem that only AI can
solve, meanwhile the weapons system will probably only use AI for a single
task and it'll be phased out in favor of a less buggy, cheaper, more effective
weapons system.

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MacsHeadroom
Accelerating change is well supported.

With regard to human intelligence, Augmented Intelligence has already extended
human minds beyond the confines of squishy flesh bags.

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ssh42
fire and wheel as an example of technological progress (that came after
biological). hmmm... Wheel came only 5-10 ths yeas ago and quickly propogated
among Afro-Eurasia. ok. But fire? it came 1.5 mln years and fire were the
reason of latest biological evolution of our species, with body able to
support larger brain. not best example of fast technological progress.

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hordeallergy
The wheel barely penetrated Africa, parts not seeing it even as recently as a
few hundred years.

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ssh42
Probably different part of Africa we are talking about:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_technology](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Egyptian_technology)

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eli_gottlieb
Flagged for hypesterism.

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peterkshultz
Can a moderator add '[video]' to the end of the title?

