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The Incoherent Singularity

Started by TLF · 10 months ago

I don’t know how I missed it, but Reason’s Ron Bailey had a great interview with libertarian entrepreneur Peter Thiel back in May. There’s a lot of discussion of the singularity, a concept I’m finding less coherent the more I think of it. The basic ... Continue reading »

4 comments

  • Ben

    1 year ago

    It seems to me that you're assumptions about this event are slightly off. (Talking about the singularity...didn't read the interview yet.)

    1. My interpretation is that these machines would have a way to simulate/emulate the human experience....thus exceeding our intelligence not our parallel computations

    2. Of course we can't predict 2040....but we can do alright at 2009....most idea and/or stories I've read seem to bring predictability down to weeks or days

    3 Not understanding the way google does something and not being able to understand are very different.

    As for me....I think by the time it happens we'll have wetware and we'll be the machines.
    reply
  • Timon

    1 year ago

    I like the phrase "The rapture of the nerds." The bumper sticker could be something like "In case of singularity, the driver of this car will be in his laptop."
    reply
  • eee_eff

    1 year ago

    tim:

    I belief that Bill Joy had a certain understanding of likely dangers that attend this belief in a 'singularity' See his "The future doesn't need us" Wired Magazine:

    http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/8.04/joy.html


    There is one way that this will become dangerous, though (and I think we are still much further away from the singularity than most people realize--thinking is very complex and variable; to wit: humans looking at 50 possible chess moves were still beating computers that saw many billions)--no humans will be competent to judge the decisions made by machines, and the machines themselves will begin to design new processes and algorithms, unimagined and utterly incomprehensible to anyone with an interest in the outcomes. We will have created the possibility--Paul Virilio would say inevitability--of a failure that is incomprehensible, and the solutions to which would be likewise incomprehensible.

    But it still is Science Fiction, not Science Fact...
    reply
  • Josh Maurice

    1 year ago

    Things do seem to me to be complexifying so fast that we're headed for, as Bucky Fuller titled one of his books, "Utopia or Oblivion" within a few minutes, months, or years.

    Please see http://joshmaurice.livejournal.com where I just posted some ideas for a coding project, maybe to comprise only 6 or 7 lines of code, that could produce much more fluidly flowing graphical Internet interfaces, enabling much more rapid, continuous feedback among millions of Internetizens.
    reply

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