Re: Singularity: Generation gap

Anders Sandberg (asa@nada.kth.se)
26 Sep 1997 16:58:18 +0200


"Mikael Johansson" <mikael_list@usa.net> writes:

> If I understand the thread correctly, the Technology Advancement mapped on
> x-axis, and the time on y, woud look like an s lying down, with a stretch
> near the x-axis to negative infinity, then somewhere an exponential rise,
> slowly breaking out of the rise, and ending up in another paralell to the
> x-axis line, at the limit of technology. I might have caught it wrong,
> Anders and Wei Dai, if so, please correct me,

It is a good picture you have of it. You can describe the sigmoid with
(say) 1+tanh(t) or something similar. Locally it can look exponential
just before the inflexion point.

Note that this model says that there is a singular moment, the inflexion
point, but does not say how steep the curve is there. It can be a
gentle slope, or a wild near-vertical.

-- 
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Anders Sandberg                                      Towards Ascension!
asa@nada.kth.se                            http://www.nada.kth.se/~asa/
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