The Technological Singularity, a special report.

[crocofish]

IEEE Spectrum (magazine of the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers) is running a special report on The Technological Singularity.  I haven't had time to get through all the articles, but it looks really good and appears to be well balanced, both pro and con.

To some atheist leaning people, The Singularity is similar to The Rapture for fundamentalist christians.

The online version of the special report can be found here.

A map of many of the pundits about The Singularity is interesting to browse.  A larger and more legible PDF in available on that page.

I find the subject fascinating, but I'm skeptical that anything like The Singularity will occur in the near future, based on our current knowledge and technology.  But humans have been technologically capable for such a minuscule time in the universe, perhaps in the distant future there will be some fantastic breakthroughs in technology and in understanding the mind.

[Vichy]

The fact that it can come on faster than you think is part of the logic of the singularity.  Once you get into automated information processing, the ability to develop technology can increase geometrically faster than even the best we can do with our smart-but-slow heads and counting on our fingers.  Essentially, assuming technological development were not hindered by political or unexpected natural roadblocks, the path from Babbages machines to nanomachines could be an unhindered multiplication of technological efficacy.
Of course I'm no expert on this, just a fan of Kurzweil and transhumanism in general, but it certainly has some logic to it.

Thanks for the link, it looks like an interesting read to break me away from economics and history.

[LARA]

I read some of this, too and I thought it was pretty balanced as well.   To me the Singularity seems like a lot of wishful thinking and imagination, but with some pretty high powered minds behind it.  

It's fun to ponder a world where all of our desires could be had at the click of a mouse, or we could download ourselves for eternal existence, I know I have dreamed silly notions like this in my spare time.     Unfortunately,  I can't really see how any of this is going to solve some of the fundamental problems such as renewable energy resoures, economic inequality, disease, overpopulation/limited resources, etc.

 I kind of hold the opinion that AI development is essentially unnessecary, what would be more practical is a world population online and being able to utilize that brainpower in problem solving rather than creating new consciousness through computing.  

There's a cool project going on like this called  Fold it (http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main) where users download a game where they can contribute to elucidating new protein folding structures for research.  Human users can do a lot better than a computer in this fashion and I'm kind of curious to see how the thing turns out.  Haven't tried it myself yet, though.

I think lots of things could be available through the net like this.  Think about the Mars photos you can view online right now.  It's a bit like exploring through the eyes of a machine, being virtually there.  Maybe we can't ever go into deep space ourselves, but it is plausible that future generations could experience the whole thing online through the lenses of bots sent out by their grandparents.  

This is where I think technology could realistically lead us, not by creating new consciousness in a Singularity event but by extending the reach of the minds we already have.  Maybe a realistic Singularity event could be the equivalent of all of humanity having online access, and the high speed communication that this could afford us.

[joeactor]

I've read a bit about this.  It has a lot of different facets to it.

The part I cannot get past is the whole "moving ourselves into a machine" thing...

Sure, we may be able to build a machine and copy ourselves into it, but that's a far cry from immortality!

Moving our "self" would entail identifying where exactly the "self" is.  If, as I believe, the "self" is an integral concept of both mind and body, then moving becomes an impossible task.

We're probably better off creating machines to maintain our bodies so that they last longer - even to the point of replacing parts ala cyborgs.

Just my 2 cents,
JoeActor

[McQ]

This is a great topic, and one we touched on only briefly in the Transhumanism thread. Being a proponent of TH, I love the idea of both AI and IA, but I still have problems with Kurzweil's extrapolations when he dives into this. Do I think that a Tech. Singularity is near? Yes. I agree with Kurzweil on that point. I agree with  Glenn Zorpette's criticism that the focus is too much on "death avoidance" and not on the overall implications of the singularity itself (or one of the several versions of it). Maybe that's my issue with Kurzweil. I'm not sure. Too focused on what we can get from it and not what it is. If it is what Kurzweil and others think it is, then there won't really be an "us", so to speak. It's transhumanism to the Nth degree, and way beyond. Damn, I'm in a hurry (again), and probably just babbled this, but it's still fun stuff to read and discuss.

[crocofish]

I read some of this, too and I thought it was pretty balanced as well.   To me the Singularity seems like a lot of wishful thinking and imagination, but with some pretty high powered minds behind it.  

You hit on the main reason (wishful thinking) that I flinch when I sometimes read about The Singularity.  I first encountered it about 10 years ago with Frank Tipler's writings about the Omega Point, his version of Singularity.  He jumped to wild conclusions based on his own speculation, and it felt more like wishful fiction than anything based on reality.  In 2007, Tipler wrote a book called The Physics of Christianity, so that might explain his more faith based view of the universe.

Then came Raymond Kurzweil with his "spiritual machines" and talk of the Singularity.  I really respected Kurzweil for his work with reading machines and music synthesizers, but then I think success and hubris made him become kind of wacky.  Because of his fame as a great mind, people would listen to him.  Now he has become almost evangelical about the Singularity.  Wired Magazine recently had an article about Kurzweil.  He is taking lots of pills, supposedly for longevity, so he can be around when the Singularity happens.

Even people with great minds can fall into the trap of wishful thinking, particularly when they consider their own mortality.  For those that don't believe in a traditional type of heaven, I think that for some people, The Singularity becomes their heaven, where they don't have to die, and everything is wonderful.  They obsessively wish for it to be true, so they steer the facts to their desired outcome.  They lose some objectivity.

There's a cool project going on like this called  Fold it (http://fold.it/portal/adobe_main) where users download a game where they can contribute to elucidating new protein folding structures for research.  Human users can do a lot better than a computer in this fashion and I'm kind of curious to see how the thing turns out.  Haven't tried it myself yet, though.

Interesting that you bring that up, just today, I started up a run of Folding@Home, which is the brute force distributed computation of protein folding.  I had not heard about Fold It, but it seems like an interesting idea.  Sounds somewhat like The Amazon Mechanical Turk which "crowdsources" humans to perform tasks over the internet that humans can do better than machine computation.

[crocofish]

Moving our "self" would entail identifying where exactly the "self" is.  If, as I believe, the "self" is an integral concept of both mind and body, then moving becomes an impossible task.

I have pondered that point a lot in the last year or so.  If the "self" is integrated into the biochemical and structural parts of the brain, extracting and moving the "self" would be difficult without destroying the "self".  If a machine is not biological, a biochemical/structural self probably wouldn't be compatible anyway.  That leaves some higher level concept of "self" that would be copied to a machine version.  What bothers me about the copying concept is that the original self is probably still in the body, and probably still experiences death.  If the machine self is a faithful copy, it has all the memories and thought processes of the original and it gets to experience the transition to machine longevity, but original self still dies.  It's like living on through an offspring, but the offspring is a faithful copy instead of a child.

Pondering that subject further recently brought out the following scary thoughts... What if chunks of "self" are continuously being copied and destroyed in your own brain.  Other cells in your body are constantly dying and being replaced, so it seems possible.  Neurons supposedly don't replicate after a certain age, but I wonder if thoughts and memories get copied around and neurons reused for different memories.  Why do I need to sleep, and what are those dreams doing at night?  Is the "self" that wakes up in the morning the same "self" that went to bed the previous night?  Or have parts of my "self" been destroyed, and I don't notice since the copies of "self chunks" are almost identical.

Could a transition to machine be a long term man-machine interface where chunks of "self" slowly migrate from the biological storage to machine storage.  If the transition is gradual, perhaps we wouldn't notice the transition.  It's a little more pleasant scenario that making a whole instant machine copy of "self", and then still having to die myself.

I'm sure some deep thinkers have covered this topic before.