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clyde

The Singularity

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The closest thing  we have to a singularity thread is the Singularity thread. How have we gone so long without a thread devoted to the plan to create confused simulations of ourselves for all of eternity in a bid to avoid joining the great majority and start saturating the universe with self-replicating twitter-bots? The 2020's are coming, who else is excited about computers with more computational power than human brains? 

 

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I am reminded of William Gibson's maxim that the future is already here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.

 

I like to keep that in mind when thinking about singularity-style technology - I won't live in a world where I have this stuff, I'll live in a world where the 1% have this stuff and I don't, and that is absolutely terrifying to me.

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Life extension tech sounds like a nightmare. Imagine if all the old white guys running the world now lived forever.

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There's an unquestioned assumption in the concept of the Singularity that always bothered me. Regarding AI, the Singularity proposes that we'll make an AI 10% smarter than us, then it will make an AI 10% smarter than it, that will make an AI 10 more percent smarter, and so on until the power of compound interest makes an unfathomable supergenius. The problem is that it assumes there's a linear difficulty curve: a 200 IQ human can make a 220 IQ AI, a 220 IQ AI can make a 242 IQ AI which can make a 266 IQ AI and so on. What if the law of diminishing returns will apply here as well as it does to everything else? A 200 IQ human makes a 220 IQ AI which makes a 230 IQ AI which makes a 235 IQ AI and things plateau rather than explode exponentially.

 

Broadly, the whole thing is based on looking at the curve of the technology graph, and assuming that trend will continue indefinitely.
extrapolating.png

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I am reminded of William Gibson's maxim that the future is already here, it just hasn't been evenly distributed yet.

 

I like to keep that in mind when thinking about singularity-style technology - I won't live in a world where I have this stuff, I'll live in a world where the 1% have this stuff and I don't, and that is absolutely terrifying to me.

 

Yeah, this is my concern too. I'm not looking forward to working for a jar with Donald Trump's head in it.

 

I'm otherwise super jazzed about it though. I especially want to give advanced AI a chance, because I figure there's no horrible thing that AI could do that we haven't already at least tried. I'm so ready for robotic law enforcement that doesn't murder unarmed teenagers because it doesn't like the exact hexidecimal colour value of their skin.

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There's an unquestioned assumption in the concept of the Singularity that always bothered me. Regarding AI, the Singularity proposes that we'll make an AI 10% smarter than us, then it will make an AI 10% smarter than it, that will make an AI 10 more percent smarter, and so on until the power of compound interest makes an unfathomable supergenius. The problem is that it assumes there's a linear difficulty curve: a 200 IQ human can make a 220 IQ AI, a 220 IQ AI can make a 242 IQ AI which can make a 266 IQ AI and so on. What if the law of diminishing returns will apply here as well as it does to everything else? A 200 IQ human makes a 220 IQ AI which makes a 230 IQ AI which makes a 235 IQ AI and things plateau rather than explode exponentially.

 

Broadly, the whole thing is based on looking at the curve of the technology graph, and assuming that trend will continue indefinitely.

extrapolating.png

 

Smarter is a tricky concept, however even the most basic AI would have access to pretty much all human knowledge which would give it a big edge.

 

The part of the "Singularity" that I am most interested in isn't that far off. Robots are getting cheaper and better, 3D printing is getting cheaper and better, autonomous cars are getting better and legalized in more states. A huge number of jobs will be eliminated by these advances. It seems very likely that all truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc will get replaced by robots (humans are the cause of 90% of auto accidents). Fast food workers could be easily replaced with robots once their prices drop enough. Take these jobs and add all the jobs that even a basic AI could do, clerical work, data entry etc and we could end up with 80%-99% unemployment. The only solution to this would be to

 

a) A guaranteed basic income for all people.

 

or preferably

 

B) elimination of the money economy, then we all live in star trek.

 

 

Life extension tech sounds like a nightmare. Imagine if all the old white guys running the world now lived forever.

 

If the technology is robotics based they will probably be afraid of it and not know how to use it properly :) 

 

"You can have every email I've ever sent -- I've never sent one," he said. "I don't know what that makes me."

- Probable Presidential Candidate Lindsey Graham

 

http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/08/politics/hillary-clinton-email-lindsey-graham/

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The part of the "Singularity" that I am most interested in isn't that far off. Robots are getting cheaper and better, 3D printing is getting cheaper and better, autonomous cars are getting better and legalized in more states. A huge number of jobs will be eliminated by these advances. It seems very likely that all truck drivers, taxi drivers, etc will get replaced by robots (humans are the cause of 90% of auto accidents). Fast food workers could be easily replaced with robots once their prices drop enough. Take these jobs and add all the jobs that even a basic AI could do, clerical work, data entry etc and we could end up with 80%-99% unemployment. The only solution to this would be to

 

a) A guaranteed basic income for all people.

 

or preferably

 

B) elimination of the money economy, then we all live in star trek.

C) Massive inequality

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C) Massive inequality

 

This is possible, but that scale of inequality would lead to revolt very quickly, as it has in the past.

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And everyone with their robot warriors would quell the rebellion.

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And everyone with their robot warriors would quell the rebellion.

again, possible, but I have a hard time believing that this would be allowed to happen. As rich and power as the 1% are, they are less powerful than they have been in the past. Plus I doubt thinking machines would accept a non-egalitarian system. The biggest flaw in Sci-Fi is giving robots human emotions, AI should be immune to greed, avarice, jealously etc due to a totally different evolutionary path and a lack of built in hormonal and evolutionarily ingrained responses. 

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again, possible, but I have a hard time believing that this would be allowed to happen. As rich and power as the 1% are, they are less powerful than they have been in the past. Plus I doubt thinking machines would accept a non-egalitarian system. The biggest flaw in Sci-Fi is giving robots human emotions, AI should be immune to greed, avarice, jealously etc due to a totally different evolutionary path and a lack of built in hormonal and evolutionarily ingrained responses. 

 

Except they're built by and for humans. I'm not usually the one going "Ragh, capitalism corruption everything sucks", but our first generation of robot overlords are going to be commissioned by the 1%, and the second generation will be made by the first.

 

Pragmatism aside, you're making some strange assumptions. If we build emotionless arbiters of pure logic, why are they going to care about humans at all? You'd have to hard-code empathy and morality into them, and to do that you'd first have to convert morality to an internally consistent logical system, good luck with that.

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@Cordeos,

 

IIRC, even with stuff like modern CPUs we are actually hitting some bottlenecks that Ninety-Three mentioned that is greatly impeding technological advance in that area.

 

I kinda just echo what Ninety-Three, Merus and Twig are saying so... :x

 

The current inequality must be solved BEFORE human labor is out of the equation (I mean completely, like robots being designed, built and fixed by robots) or else everyone beneath certain threshold would be massacred

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I'm still very skeptical about any kind of real AI happening any time soon. The only AI so far is specialized in some specific area defined by humans, and humans have figured out the maths of how to make the AI for that specific area. Of course it will all get more and more powerful, probably beyond what we are imagining now, and it will do more and more clever things and understand us better. We'll probably have translator devices from any language to any language, that work flawlessly with real time voice translation, alternate reality, etc. and we'll have flawless self-driving cars and F1 drivers will be replaced by AI, but we'll not have AI that actually thinks for itself.

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I'm not very knowledgable about computer-learning or A.I., but my experiences playing Artificial Life have given me the impression that defacto A.I. just needs a genetic algorithm and the ability to mutate its' own fitness functions to some degree. The individual phenotypes are dumb, but the colonies as a whole seem capable of solving problems without human input.

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One thing to consider. If robots took all of our jobs and left us with a 99% unemployment rate, then nobody would have any money to pay for any of the goods and services that these robots are providing. Which means that that top 1% would only have a total market of 1% of the total population that would actually be capable of purchasing goods and services.

 

Thus there would certainly have to be a guaranteed basic income for all people so that we can continue to do our part to keep the rich people rich.

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One thing to consider. If robots took all of our jobs and left us with a 99% unemployment rate, then nobody would have any money to pay for any of the goods and services that these robots are providing. Which means that that top 1% would only have a total market of 1% of the total population that would actually be capable of purchasing goods and services.

 

Thus there would certainly have to be a guaranteed basic income for all people so that we can continue to do our part to keep the rich people rich.

 

I think the only reason this is true right now is because labor is still worth something. If all the work to make luxury goods can be done by robots and algorithms, then the entireity of the market could just be rich folks selling super nice golf-carts to each other. 

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One thing to consider. If robots took all of our jobs and left us with a 99% unemployment rate, then nobody would have any money to pay for any of the goods and services that these robots are providing. Which means that that top 1% would only have a total market of 1% of the total population that would actually be capable of purchasing goods and services.

 

Thus there would certainly have to be a guaranteed basic income for all people so that we can continue to do our part to keep the rich people rich.

 

Umm... no... if top 1% have everything (including labor), they won't need a market to pay them or deal with anyone for anything outside of that 1%.  If you have full control over entire supply chain of every goods and commodity, all you need to do is just keep the machines rolling.  The 99% would literally be killed, quarantined, or become some sort of pet population.

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But you guys are missing a key point. What good is all that wealth and power with nobody to lord it over?

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But you guys are missing a key point. What good is all that wealth and power with nobody to lord it over?

 

:x

 

some sort of pet population.

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And guess what pets need to survive. Food, water, a place to sleep, and a bunch of random toys to make them more entertaining as pets.

 

In other words, a guaranteed basic income.

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And guess what pets need to survive. Food, water, a place to sleep, and a bunch of random toys to make them more entertaining as pets.

 

In other words, a guaranteed basic income.

 

And pets can be killed off whenever owner feels like it, bred for specific purpose, and basically lack any means of effective protection from poor ownership.

 

Income is a very misleading term to describe what pets receive from their owners.  Income implies agency.  Pets don't have one beyond what owners grant for the time being.

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Is that really all that different from our current situation?

 

Also, another thought. Let's say you guys are right and 99% of us get totally fucked over. Um, can't we all just go form our own non-robotic economy?

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Is that really all that different from our current situation?

 

It is hugely different.  It's looking bleak now but they can't run the world without 99% and 99% actually has means of fighting back because of it.  Just take military (most important) for example, where all weapons are still operated (even the drones) by people, majority of which falls well inside (edit: major typo lol) of that 99%.

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