Do you think 'Interesting Times' lie ahead? And what will be the outcome?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I have recently finished reading ‘The Artilect War’, a treatise by Professor Hugo de Garis the basic premise is that within this century there will be massive global conflict due to the rise of truly intelligent AI’s. While the book was more than a little overblown it did have some thought-provoking aspects.

While mulling over it I read the below post which succintly put into words what I’ve been feeling myself about the near future, that a number of aspects are coming together that mean the relatively peaceful and stable Western society we are used to may be about to go through some massive changes along with the rest of the world.

From the ‘Hey - it’s only one month till the apocalypse!’ thread in MPSIMS (sorry, I don’t know the proper way to quote from another thread)

I am hopeful for the future, I think that the general global trend of progress in many spheres will continue but I do think there will also be some extremely dangerous and destructive periods and that one of those is approaching in the near future.

I was born in 1978, if I had been born in 1878 I would have been 36 when World War One broke out, there is still plenty of time for ‘interesting’ things to happen in my life. I grew up in Northern Ireland during the latter part of ‘The Troubles’ so I’m not totally unfamiliar with a distorted social and political reality and it may well be that from the late 90’s to today has only been a peaceful interlude in local and wider conflict.

I don’t think a ‘Technological Singularity’ will take place but I do think there may be a technological revolution that will be obvious in hindsight that isn’t really predicatable now, just look at the Internet and the ubiqitiousness of mobile phones, it wasn’t long ago that neither of those things really existed beyond a small niche.

Thoughts? :slight_smile:

2

I don’t really share your vision, however if there is a chance at such a singularity I believe it will be on the genetic front rather than with AI or electronic technology. Designing children or conquering aging will change the world into an unimaginable place, changing just about every human dynamic.

3

Looking at Hugo’s Wiki page, his main claim to fame seems to be failing to create the AIs he is warning us about.

4

Well, some might argue that we already live in “interesting times”. The period since 9/11/2001 has been largely marked by international conflict, economic and political turmoil and environmental change. Similar to WWI, I think we are entering a period of rapid global change.

5

I think, and hope, that there’s a changing of the guard imminent. A tipping point where the “Baby Boomer” generation that currently runs the world is about to die out in enough numbers for “Generation X” to finally dominate. When that happens change will occur, though it’s hard to tell what that will be. I think things like increasing acceptance of Gay Marriage, and forward progress on alternative sustainable energy resources are signs of that approaching change.

6

Oh, yes.

Massive population collapse.

7

Man made machines are getting better and better at coming up with solutions to problems. Our physical mobility used to be limited to biology, now our machines (planes, boats, cars, trains, etc) give us mobility far greater than what we had just via walking or jogging. The same will happen in this century with our cognitive abilities. Machines that can comprehend and solve problems far better and faster than even the most genetically talented humans will come up (and already are in embryonic form if you consider things like Watson from Jeopardy, but that is just answering questions, not creating novel solutions to novel problems on a case by case basis by comprehending the problem, comprehending the goal and creating a means of getting there).

But aside from that nations are being lifted out of poverty, there are democracy movements over the globe, the US is sliding into plutocracy, China will overtake our economy in 10 years, etc. Lots of interesting stuff will happen. I am hoping to see the fall of North Korea in my lifetime as an example.

The singularity is supposed to occur when robots become smart, because they will create even smarter robots, which will create even smarter robots. But I am not so sure about that. The universe, from what I can see, is not ‘that’ complex. Even as of 2012 with just a few hundred years of less than 1% of the population with IQs of maybe 120-150 doing meaningful science, we understand natural law pretty well (as well as engineering, biology, etc). Kurzweil likes to talk about exponential growth in things like hard drive capacity or broadband speed. The problem with that is people don’t ‘need’ exponential HD capacity or broadband speed. I got along fine with 5Mbps broadband 15 years ago and it is still fine. My current hard drive is about 8x bigger than the one I had 10 years ago (not 1000 times bigger as would be expected by exponential growth every 12 months). I’m assuming the same will happen with intelligent machines, the demand for super, super smart machines won’t be there.

Machines that are 5x smarter than humans will be amazing and help us solve a lot of problems. They can probably help rewire or brains and bodies, cure diseases, end wars, create renewable energy cheaply, etc. But machines that are 100x smarter, or 1,000,000 smarter (Kurzweil things machines trillions of times smarter will exist by 2100), after a while who cares. The universe is based on physics and chemistry and complexity seems like it can only go so far before it becomes pointless to become smarter. If the smartest humans can create so many amazing advances based on physics and chemistry with IQs in the 130 range, why would exponential growth in cognitive abilities lead to exponential growth in problem solving? Our problems don’t get exponentially harder.

Is there a cap on the complexity of what we can do with physics, math and chemistry in the universe? After a while it seems like the most complex things you can do in this universe will be like the equivalent pre-school. And it doesn’t matter if you have an IQ of 85 or 210, most people can handle pre-school level problems and solutions. Why would you need an IQ of 50,000 to handle pre-school?

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Most of the trends aren’t too different from those already happening since the end of the Cold War. Rather I think we’re entering a period like the 19th Century from the Congress of Vienna to World War I since the USSR broke up (in this analysis the Arab Spring would be comparable to the Revolutions of 1830 or 1848) -a period of rapid change in many areas but no cataclysmic global conflicts and overall relatively peaceful and pleasent compared to what came before and after it.

The big themes in this century are going to be globalization, the democratization of virtually all the major states in the world, social liberalism/secularism vs religion/tradition, transhumanism, automization, and the search for new sources of energy.

9

Considering we live in the age of the internet, the entire world has been VERY interesting since the mid 90’s and will continue to be even more so as the internet grows and thrives.

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"‘I think there is a world market for about five computers’
—Atributed to IBM Chairman Thomas J. Watson, 1943.

Maybe he was right, and they will just do everything.
The reason they call it a “singularity” is because it is difficult to impossible to extrapolate any predictions beyond it. We just can’t imagine what the world will be like once we can create machines that can create even better machines.

Our problems may not get “exponentially harder” but they don’t seem to get solved either.

Also, if this board is any indication, most of the people with IQs in the 130+ range are spending their time here, bickering over politics, movie minutiae and how “nice guys” can get themselves laid.:smiley:

There are a lot of people who would be unhappy with many of those changes. If not managed properly, they have the potential to create a lot of conflict.

11

LOL, this made my day

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Once we finally create the sexbots who will create even BETTER sexbots who will create even BETTER sexbots, I’ll be just fine. And dead from all the orgasms, most likely.

13

Certainly, the same was true for changes like industrialization, expansion of settlement, political liberalization, and the abolition of slavery in the 19th Century.

14

I guess I agree with you; progress will continue in many areas, many of the things we know will become obsolete, and there will be political upheaval and destruction in many parts of the globe, possibly in the near future. But I don’t see how that’s any different than every single century since we started writing things down.

15

It is the nature of humans to make any times “interesting.”

16

Well, Moore’s law is generally considered to be a doubling every 18 months, so your calculation is a bit off. But even then, you can’t just look at a single device that you own and decide that future technological progress isn’t important. Single products may have slowed down, but the capacity for computation continues to expand. 10 years ago, I didn’t even own a cell phone. I now carry in my pocket a computer more powerful than the hulking pile that used to take up room on my desk. In another 20 years, that processing power will be woven into our clothes and painted onto our walls and distributed across our cities in ways that are pretty hard to predict today.

Someone already beat me to the Watson quote about computers, but I think you’re wrong. I think that there is effectively no end to the amount of useful computation that can be done. The only limiting factor is the cost at which we can do it.

The history of scientific and technological advancement has been that we think we’re right on the cusp of understanding everything, only to discover that, well, everything turns out to be a lot more complicated than we thought. We thought we understood the nature of matter when we figured out that molecules were made of atoms, then again, when we determined that atoms were made of protons and neutrons and electrons, then again when we discovered that those are made up of quarks. We thought we’d conquered disease with antibiotics, but it turns out that diseases respond with mutations and resistance, and we need newer and more nuanced techniques to combat that. Plus, we still haven’t managed to do much with viruses. I don’t know about your desktop hard drive, but I want an integrated biocomputer that can generate artificial antibodies and kick the hell out of the common cold. We thought we’d unlocked the secret to life by understanding DNA. But it turns out that epigenetics is phenomenally more complicated, and seems to be woven through the way all organisms develop.

There is so much more to be discovered.

17

My point was that it appears that the natural and physical sciences of this universe have a finite level of complexity and depth to them (except for maybe math) and all other forms of science and research are in one way or another based on the natural sciences. Biology, engineering, IT, etc come down to natural law and the physical sciences. Is there really an infinite level of complexity to the comprehension and manipulation of chemistry or physics? I don’t see one on the horizon (unless of course smart AI invents one, which would make my argument moot even if it were true. For all I know they could create an alternate dimension where there are infinite levels of those things to work with).

You are talking about things on a 50-100 year timeline. I’m talking bigger than that since the human race has already survived 200,000 years w/o science, I’m sure we will survive far far longer (probably for infinity in my view, we are already discovering realistic ways to avert asteroids as an example and will probably have a working system in the 21st century so we will have not only mostly conquered famine and disease but also alien threats like asteroids. the longer we survive the harder it gets to truly eliminate us. Even if 99% of humans died that still leaves 70 million) now that we have science to aid our survival. Human problems again are not infinite, and the field of physics doesn’t seem like there are infinitely more things to learn that can’t eventually be learned based on extrapolation of existing knowledge. Mastering the common cold, or bioengineered computers, or infectious diseases or poverty are massive laudable goals. But those are finite problems requiring a finite level of cognitive ability to solve the same way it requires a finite level of bandwidth to watch TV over your computer or a finite level of cognitive abilities to complete 6th grade.

I think you and Msmith are misinterpreting what I meant and the scale on which I meant it. My point is the laws that the universe are based on seem to have a finite level of complexity to them and after a while more cognitive abilities doesn’t seem like it would offer more benefit. But I could be wrong about that and even if there are, finding a way around it could probably happen too.

Bacterial resistance is a problem. But they mutate at a finite level and at a finite speed. Human biology is for all intents and purposes finite. Granted we can expand on it and become transhuman, but even that is based on chemistry and physics which are again finite in my view.

I guess that is why they call it the singularity, as Kurzweil said it is like earthworms trying to figure out what humans will do next. We can’t really guess.

18

But isn’t that what we’ve thought at every point along the way, and haven’t we always uncovered another level of complexity underneath? I was trying to get at that with my molecules->atoms->subatomic particles->quarks progression, but I probably could have been clearer. Maybe physical laws are actually infinitely complex, but we only ever understand a certain finite approximation?

Even if there is a finite complexity to laws, that doesn’t mean that there isn’t value in being 100 trillion times (or whatever sound like a huge number) more intelligent. We already know of problems that are uncomputable. That is, they are mathematically impossible to solve using any concept of a computer that we can think of. And those aren’t just esoteric math problems. Plenty of them would be really useful to be able to solve! So, either (1) they actually are uncomputable, in which case there’s no limit to the amount of improvement you can get via faster computers (just because you can’t solve a problem doesn’t mean you can’t compute useful approximations. Faster computers means better approximations), or (2), they are computable, but only by a machine and a mathematics that’s completely beyond us now. Either way, smarter machines than we will continue making progress on it.

My examples are things in the near future, but my claim is not at all limited to them. I’m talking about as long as you want. I claim that until the heat death of the universe, if there is more computation available, there will be something useful to do with it.

That my examples are near-term is because I’m simply constrained by my own limits of imagination, and of needing to refer to things that would make sense to other readers of this thread. But the idea that there isn’t much more to learn or discover than I can currently conceive of is foolish.

Interesting that you mention IT, since it’s a field of knowledge that didn’t even really exist a hundred years ago. What sorts of things that we don’t even think about will be major new fields and industries in the next thousand years (assuming we don’t blow ourselves up before then)?

Can you articulate what such a scientific field would look like if there were infinitely more things to learn? Statements like this strike me as naive, like the patent examiner who resigned in the early 20th century because “there was nothing left to invent”. I realize that you’re not saying that. But it seems like the difference between that statement and yours is one of degree, not of kind.

We’ve barely explored a vanishingly small fraction of the known universe. And that’s just the part we know about!

19

In the course of ~100 years we’ve gone from molecules->atoms->subatomic particles->quarks. But assume string theory is correct and it doesn’t get any lower than that with regards to size. Or assume there never is conclusive evidence of a multiverse and our existence never gets bigger than our universe. The universe is 13.7 billion years old. It is finite in size and has existed for a finite time.

I get the impression you are talking about inventions and advances. But to me inventions and advances fundamentally come down to a knowledge of math, physics and chemistry, and we already have a good understanding of how these things work (not perfect by any means though). Biology as an example is an extension of those three. Medicine is an extension of biology (so is sociology, the study of biological human society). So arguably if you understand the laws governing behavior in those 3 fields, you can understand biology. If you understand biology you can understand medicine. etc.

I’m not saying there aren’t an infinite number of things to invent, but that the physical laws we have to operate within while we invent them are finite.

To people like Terence Tao or Edward Witten, they can do entry level math and physics in their sleep. A machine with an IQ even of 350 would probably feel the same way about the most advanced human math, physics and chemistry research being done by people like Tao or Witten. But after a while, if the laws of physics and chemistry are finite and you can extrapolate in virtual reality any outcome you want before you build it in the real world based on that perfect knowledge, it becomes easy to invent virtually anything imaginable within them. What would more cognitive abilities do at that point? If you have AI which understandings the laws of physics, chemistry and math ‘perfectly’ (if such a thing is possible. As an example I think Newtonian physics is pretty much understood in whole at this point but my point is a machine which understood all math, physics and chemistry as well as we currently understand newtonian physics. But again, math could be infinite I wouldn’t know) and it has a virtual reality simulator based on this then it can do anything. But what would a machine 1000 smarter than that one do? It isn’t going to understand the laws of chemistry, physics and math ‘more’ perfectly. It still has to operate under the same finite laws.

I’m probably just limiting myself to what organic humans would perceive. I have no idea what a machine with 10000x the cognitive abilities of us would perceive. I’m sure they’d invent new dimensions or something like that.

20

My w.a.g. is that in the next hundred years either civilization will collapse and humanity will begin a slide down to an Easter Island level of existence, or else we’ll muddle through and be poised to do some wonderful things. My guesses for the latter:
[ul]
[li]After a fifty-year hiatus since the early 1970s we’ll finally start expanding into space in a serious way, thanks to private space ventures.[/li][li]3D-fabrication will reach the home hobbyist level and be as revolutionary as PCs were.[/li][li]The human body will be reverse-engineered, and we’ll be able to say exactly what physical traits come from what genes.[/li][li]Great strides will be made in understanding how the human brain works, although still not to the point of being able to reproduce human intelligence artificially.[/li][li]Computers will get very smart however, to the point that autonomous robots as smart as animals will be developed.[/li][li]We’ll figure out how to mass produce carbon nanotube based materials so much stronger than steel that it will change what’s considered structurally possible.[/li][li]Enhanced human longevity may not be achieved but we’ll learn enough to know for certain that it’s possible.[/li][li]We’ll either discover planets with oxygen atmospheres, or prove that Earth is a one in a billion miracle planet.[/li][/ul]