From: Dan Clemmensen (Dan@Clemmensen.ShireNet.com)
Date: Tue Jul 07 1998 - 20:26:52 MDT
Bryan Moss wrote:
>
> I’m always hearing the Singularity mentioned on
> this list but I’m not sure if I understand the
> concept fully. There are several different
> scenarios I’ve heard:
>
> 1) The point where population growth apparently
> goes infinite and that *something* must happen at
> this point. For instance, we all upload and we
> really can have an infinite population. This, I
> think, is stretching statistics a little too far.
It certainly indicates that the trends that we are extrapolating must somehow
undergo a change sometime in the near future. In that sense, we are talking
about a relatively sudden (i.e., within 20 years or so) change in a set of
trends that appear to have been reasonable invariant for a long time (millenia).
Yes, this is just playing with numbers. It's still interesting.
>
> 2) Artificial Intelligence speeds up the creation
> of more powerful computers and intelligence’s.
> This seems wrong because hardware and software
> power is already a major factor in the increase of
> hardware and software power. There is no reason to
> suggest this trend would suddenly change.
Yes, computer hardware and software have been contributing to
the development of the next generation of computre hardware and
software, but this is a relatively recent trend. Software and
hardware development productivity is horrible, and IMO we
are still taking baby steps. A breakthrough is not unreasonable.
>
> 3) A Super Intelligence emerges from a distributed
> network, such as the Internet. I think this goes
> against current network/software/hardware models
> and that a distributed intelligence would only
> emerge under certain (possibly engineered)
> circumstances that current trends in hardware,
> software and the economy would not support.
In my personal model, the SI is not purely an emergent
phenomenon of the net. The net serves as the raw material
for a directed augmentation of an initial proto-SI that first
emerges as the result of a catenation of a set of development tools
and a human programmer.
>
> Otherwise it is just treated as the point beyond
> which we cannot predict (sometimes called the
> Horizon). Although the curves are certainly moving
> upwards I see no evidence that we should get ready
> for a sudden surge in power, the collapse of world
> government, the onslaught of Super Intelligence’s,
> etc.
>
OK, let's take something very simple: Moore's law. We all know that
Moore's law is simply an observation of a historical trend and cannot
be assumed to have any predictive power, but the trend is quite
robust and has already survived through several technological
generations. Furthemore, it's fairly easy to see the next several
steps, getting us through the next 20 years without recourse to
fundamental breakthroughs. 20 years of Moore's law gains us another
factor of a million in each of several computer capability parameters.
Instead of asking a radical singulatarian such as myself to comment,
please allow me to ask you to predict the effect of this level of
computing capacity on society.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Fri Nov 01 2002 - 14:49:18 MST