I know that we live in an era where there is globalisation, with handphones the internet etc. We, also have super-advanced computers which can beat top chess players. On the military side, we also have high-tech planes and nuclear bombs. However, just 50 years ago we do not have handphones, the internet and such and we are already referring our society to be “high-tech” like as if we had those spaceships and teleportation devices in star trek already. I know for a fact that during the 20th century, our technological advances during that century beats all the other centuries combined. Our advancing technology is increasing exponentially and show no signs of stopping. However, people are already predicting that we will reach a singularity during the mid-21st century when just a generation ago my parents do not even have any computers. For me, this time period is only barely the birth of a modern high-tech period…anyone agrees?
“Reach a singularity”? What does that mean?
I was going to ask a Q here: “Are we destined to become the Borg?” which is more or less the
same question. I for one do NOT look forward to such an eventuality, because I fear much of
that which makes humankind unique will be lost.
What i mean is that we are approaching a technological singularity, this is because if you look at technological advances through history you will see that the number of inventions we are producing are increasing exponentially, therefore the gradient of no. of inventions per time period will start to get steeper until it reaches a perfectly vertical line…How can this happened?Possible, if we create robots who have advance AI who can think and build robots themselves and etc. Far-fetched but still it is much debated around the scientific community…
Ah, I see, thanks. No, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that it is not possible for human beings or their AI elves to produce a literally infinite number of new inventions in any finite period of time. I’m inclined to think that that vertical line is an asymptote, which the function can approach more closely but not actually reach.
The OP needs to bone up on exactly how exponentials work. Yes, the 20th century saw more technological advancement than all previous centuries combined. The 19th century also saw more technological advancement than all previous centuries combined. So did the 18th, and the 17th, and every century. The fact that technology grows exponentially actually means that the current era isn’t special.
As for the AI singularity, the assumption is that once we build an AI that’s smarter than us (which isn’t likely to happen any time soon, anyway), that AI then, by virtue of being smarter than us, will be better capable than us at constructing other AIs, and will therefore immediately build another AI which is even smarter yet, and so on. The problem is that this completely ignores timescales. Yes, we might be able to build an AI smarter than us, but it’s taken us millions of years. Maybe that first AI would be smart enough that it would only take it a few hundred thousand, to design its sucessor. That would still be better than we did, but it’d hardly be instantaneous.
It seems to me that calling ourselves a high tech society would necessarily mean we’re comparing ourselves to other societies. Compared to Great Britain, Japan, South Korea, Germany, France, etc. I wouldn’t say we were all that high tech. In fact, according to GURPS, we’re all pretty much at Tech Level 8 with a few pockets at level 7 or even 9.
If I lived in a society where we mastered the use of bone needles and arrowheads I might think we were high tech compared to the boneheads in the mountains who only use stone for arrowheads and can’t make needles.
Marc
I think you got that backwards. You expect things to continually grow exponentially – but the OP expects it to behave like an asymptote.
Now I’m confused: what I meant to say was that the plot of number of inventions versus time would never actually become a vertical line, i.e., invention speed will never become literally infinite. Sorry if I goofed in expressing it.
In addition, I think there is an extremely naive understanding of what “smarter” might possibly mean.
“Smarter” is a measure of problem solving. If there were no problems to be solved, then there would be no “smarts.”
Problem solving requires a goal. Extremely narrow goals have fewer trade-offs amongst the various solutions. Broader goals (meaning, really, multiple simultaneous variables being optimized) have more trade-offs, but rarely (possibly never) is there a perfect solution. Solve the problem faster? Expend more energy. Conserve energy and solve the problem fast, lose accuracy, etc. etc.
I get the impression that some people think we can produce an AI that produces a solution optimized 100% on 14 variables when in reality no solution actually exists.
I’m not arguing that humans are the peak of intelligence/problem solving, I just think there are some mathematical realities regarding the solution space to any problem we present to a human or an AI. You don’t just magically get the “best” answer, you have to work hard at aligning your goals and the solutions being produced, otherwise you get garbage.
I think we’re heading there. One way I’ve heard the singularity interpreted is that once the singularity has been passed it will be impossible to make any future predictions about what the future will be like because anything you could imagine will likely be surpassed or bypassed entirely by the rate of advancement. A person born in 1800 might not have foreseen the advent of the railroad and some of the other changes brought on by the developing industrial revolution but if he were shown what his life would be like at the end of his lifespan, I doubt it would be too surprising to him. Consider the same for a person born in 1900, I think they would be considerably more surprised at the level of basic change brought by advances in transportation, communication, media, medicine, culture and lifestyle typical in any modern city. I’m not sure that a person born in 2000 will be able to comprehend the differences in the human experience that will occur between now and whenever the end of their lives will be (which in and of itself is a question open to debate because we’re working on improving the useful lifespan), the rate of technological advancement is that fast.
Unless “society” is used in a global rather than a national sense. Of course, we don’t have a global society yet, only a global economy – but increasing economic globalization and rapid communication might get us there before we expect. Now there’s a singularity! In the sense that there is absolutely no way to clearly perceive what might lie on the other side of it. (I’ve heard the potential of nanotechnology characterized as a “singularity” in that sense – we can anticipate it, we can speculate what it might be used for, but we can no more imagine its full social effects than a 19th-Century automobile inventor could have anticipated gridlock, suburban sprawl, or petroleum wars.)
Am I not right in saying that in the real, tangible world, any system that exhibits exponential growth cannot do so indefinitely? Growth may follow an exponential curve for a while, but will level out when limiting factors come into play. Or can someone cite an example of a physical system in which no such limits exist or are active?