

Programming for a culture approaching singularity - rsaarelm
http://lukepalmer.wordpress.com/2010/07/22/programming-for-a-culture-approaching-singularity/

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arethuza
I don't think we are seeing any signs of approaching a singularity. However,
it is clear we are going through a major technological step change as
significant as printed books and mass transport.

I just found this quote which I love:

"A man born in 1453, the year of the fall of Constantinople, could look back
from his fiftieth year on a lifetime in which about eight million books had
been printed, more perhaps than all the scribes of Europe had produced since
Constantine founded his city in A.D. 330"

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book>

~~~
bsaunder
What signs do you think you will see?

I think we are hitting a new reality where people are having a hard time
adding value. Over time, I think computers and robots will be able to automate
and out perform most human tasks.

Much effort is put on retraining people for new jobs. The problem is that
there will come a point where no human will beat the automated systems and no
amount of training will fix that. On the top end of the scale, we have
brilliant people that are forced to accept low wage research jobs or jobs that
have nothing to do with their specialty.

Have you seen the diapers.com automated warehouse video? How long do you think
it will take before every non-unionized retail chain has automated the
restocking of their stores. How many net jobs do you think that will create?

I'm not saying the "Singularity" is approaching. But I do wonder what the
signs would be and if these are some of them.

~~~
kiba
_Useful_ automation is going to lead to more wealth, which mean more free time
for other stuff.

However, there come a point that automation approach the point where further
investment will yield diminishing marginal returns. People are going to
automate so much.

Just because you have a machine that produces 1,000,000 cokes in an hour
doesn't mean you're going to make more money. What you will end up is a
machine that actually cost a lot to maintain, and produce lot of cokes that
will be thrown away due to the bottleneck in other parts of the production
chain.

~~~
bsaunder
_Useful automation is going to lead to more wealth, which mean more free time
for other stuff._

Sure, I think this exactly describes our current situation. Ironically, that
"more wealth" is very disproportionately distributed between the owner of the
automation mechanism and the workers that have been automated away. Similarly
the notion of "more free time" is equally disproportionate.

One better go get another job, one can sit back and enjoy life.

~~~
kiba
_Sure, I think this exactly describes our current situation. Ironically, that
"more wealth" is very disproportionately distributed between the owner of the
automation mechanism and the workers that have been automated away. Similarly
the notion of "more free time" is equally disproportionate. One better go get
another job, one can sit back and enjoy life._

Only if you care about _relative_ wealth. Do you really care if somebody got
awarded a billion bucks while you get awarded a 100,000 dollars equivalent in
lifestyle quality increase?

It is a misconception to think that you can just sit back and enjoy life.
There is competition from other businessmen after all. They will automates,
and continue to drive down cost. One of the reason why some people can do
these kinds of thing you talked about is because inefficient markets exists
and people are too lazy to challenge the guy. That's not always a problem if
it is not too hard for an entrepreneur to recognize and move in.

However, the cost of maintaining a given lifestyle should goes down, as long
as people don't keep increasing their consumption expenditure.

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qwzybug
Anyone who thinks the technological singularity is a viable idea ought to
listen to Bruce Sterling's Long Now talk, "The Singularity: Your Future as a
Black Hole".

[http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-
you...](http://longnow.org/seminars/02004/jun/11/the-singularity-your-future-
as-a-black-hole/)

The whole notion is really dreadfully implausible and poorly thought-through.
A few computer-centric technologists take their hobby to be the most important
thing in the world, as if the exponential growth of transistors on a chip or
bits on the web are more important than the (stagnant) power grid, energy and
food production, global war and peace, etc.

Admittedly, that's not an uncommon phenomenon in these parts.

~~~
DennisP
Biology is making enormous strides as well. I could see that having an impact
on energy and food production.

Of course, that's driven in part by advances in computation, just like a lot
of other technology. Plasma physics, for example, which could yet make a big
difference for energy.

~~~
qwzybug
Sure, but that's not to discount the main point, which is that
singularitarians arbitrarily privilege the importance of computational
advancement over the real world. This is probably because computers are the
easiest to draw the exponential advancement graph for (and because
singularitarians hardly ever leave the basement).

Vernor Vinge predicted the singularity not before 2005 and not after 2030.
Will we have crazysauce computers by then? Definitely. Will anything else in
the world have caught up with the pace at which we apply transistors to
wafers? Probably not.

One of Sterling's points is that the singularity is like dot-com startups in
the 1990s: it doesn't have a business model. I think it would be right to say
that it doesn't scale, either; there are too many other bottlenecks in the
system where we wave our hands and say something about just throwing more
metal at it.

Seriously, though, check out the talk, it's quite good.

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phreeza
The unix philosophy is along these lines i think, making small tools that do
one thing well, and text input/output. Perhaps its time for an update of this
for the 21st century.

~~~
kiba
I recall the GNU project being somewhat ambitious about these sort of stuff.
If the rest of the world were rebuilt to be like emacs(uniformly customizable,
extensible, and self documenting), I'll go totally bonkers.

Suddenly, my playground is no longer limited to emacs, but the entire
computing environment. However, this kind of code idealism is unfortunately
killed by good enough and the desire of the FSF of going into politics.

That's what _freedom_ to me is like. It's not something nebulous like fighting
evil developers or something. It's a world in which users feel like a badass,
and which everything is an extension of _your mind_. It's a crying shame that
the free software world wasn't able to realize that kind of potential.

~~~
kmort
Do you feel that the Semantic Web concept now leads that charge?

~~~
ThomPete
The Semantic web isn't the solution IMHO.

The problem with the semantic web is that it forces a narrative based on an
ontological approach.

But in my mind the real value in connecting everything is the connections
themselves rather then their meaning which should never be settled. In other
words the value of connecting everything is that it opens up for multiple
interpretations, descriptions and clustering.

We should look at data more like neurons than ontological items. I.e. absent
of meaning without context.

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endergen
Singularity talk is reminiscent of the early AI work, everyone thought they
were on the verge of creating human level AI. Yeah, that didn't
happen(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_winter>). How's this any different?
What makes you so confident it will suddenly happen now? That we have more
data, that we are mucking around with our brains more?

I'm with qwzybug, I echo his sentiment.

~~~
DennisP
Nobody thinks it will suddenly happen now. They think that Moore's Law will
continue for another fifty or seventy years, and that somewhere in there,
computers or computer-human hybrids will start to be smarter than unenhanced
humans. What happens after that, we're not smart enough right now to predict.

