Re: dialectic

Spike Jones (spike66@ibm.net)
Sun, 31 Oct 1999 14:35:19 -0800

hal@finney.org wrote:

> We've had super-exponential growth for a long time. Have we passed
> through a Singularity already? A cave man given a vision of the future
> up to our time might have trouble wrapping his mind around the changes.
> By some definitions this could be taken to mean that we have already
> passed through a Singularity. Hal

A cave man? Modern humans are brain boggled by the changes that have come in our lifetimes. In fact, I see this as a limiting factor to technology. People are unwilling to change faster than a certain pace. Alex Bokov's concept of local maxima will become very important soon, as we see evidence of just such things all around us. Talk to people, see how very many people reject the idea of extending life out to just 500 years for instance. You might be amazed at how many will state that they *do not want* to live that long, even if they could do so with good health!

Your notion of having passed thru a singularity of sorts has occurred to me as well. Not in the Yudkowskian sense of singularity, but if viewed from a distance we are in the midst of a sudden and violent explosion. spike