But - aren’t we already there? As we think about the past decade - look at how much has changed in terms of social networking, collaborative decision-making, the emergence of a full-surveillance reality where we are recording all things at all times and then using Big Data analytics to analyze that data. From an historical perspective - there’s no going back; Earth history will look at the introduction of the Internet in a Before/After way, similar to how we look at the Printing Press, Agriculture, Relativity, etc…
It may be, I dunno…“sexier” to look at the Tech Singularity as the emergence of Tech-based Consciousness in the form of an individual machine with a sense of identity. But I think our use of tech to augment our own consciousness to the degree that we are now will be looked at in hindsight as the Tech Singularity that has been predicted…
Do termites know that humans are sentient? Would we recognize an emergent technological intelligence?
That being said, I believe that every generation since the Industrial Revolution has seen technological changes which would make their everyday life baffling to a previous generation. Other than that (which is a commonplace and boring observation) most Singularity-mongers are really just talking about a Nerd Rapture, when they can finally have an “I told you so” moment against the jocks and dummies.
The way I look at the singularity is more like the horizon. That there isn’t one singularity. As you approach it, there’s another one in the future. So, for where we are now, we’re in or past the internet and wireless hyper-connectivity one, but there’s plenty of potential for far more advanced technology that we haven’t seen. But imagine 30 years ago, the internet on a global scale, being able to communicate with anyone in the world instantly, it’s all unthinkable, but they were well within an age with television and computers that people 50-100 years before wouldn’t have been able to imagine. They could get information across the world in days or hours when it would take weeks or months otherwise. And before that you have huge changes like electricity, cars.
To that extent, I do think we’re at a point where we’re moving faster and these singularities are coming faster and faster and are harder and harder to predict past. Looking back to the late 90s, even seeing the internet growing and expecting it to be huge, I don’t think very many people would have predicted Smart Phones, Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and these sorts of things, and I’m only looking back 15 years or so.
To that end, I wouldn’t be surprised to see a similar sort of revolution in the next 10-15 years that we just can’t even imagine now. And then after that point, it will seem every bit as revolutionary as the internet does now, computers before that, etc.
I think you’re missing a key part of the singularity:
[QUOTE=Technological singularity - Wikipedia]
Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.
[/QUOTE]
The idea is not just that technology has changed, leaving previous generations in the dust. The idea is what we have created an intelligence greater than our own, which can then improve itself far beyond where we are the grand scheme of things.
Since Hard AI is still fiction, not reality, we haven’t hit the singularity yet. That doesn’t mean technology isn’t changing or that Ray Kurzweil isn’t a toolbag, it just means this isn’t the same concept as going from horse-and-buggy to 747s.
The idea of the singularity is simply nonsense. AI is a fantasy, computers can do no more than they are programmed to do, and ever so it shall remain. The humble opinion of a lifelong computer programmer.
Nope. the singularity is when man made inventions transcend our cognitive limitations.
take transportation. our biological transportation is walking, but now we have boats, planes, jets, cars. even the most biologically fit person can’t hold a candle to a car as transportation. the singularity is supposed to be the same for problem solving abilities. when it hits, supposedly problems that seem insurmountable to us will be solvable at a rapid pace. intelligence is a means of achieving goals in a fluctuating world, the singularity hits when our problem solving and goal achieving abilities are dramatically augmented, including our ability to invent even better methods of problem solving. human perceptions and problems are fundamentally finite, in theory someday our most complex problems will be child’s play to an advanced Ai.
I don’t know if I agree with the time line since a lot place it around 2040, but I’m pretty sure it’ll be before 2100.
[QUOTE=Wesley Clark]
Nope. the singularity is when man made inventions transcend our cognitive limitations.
[/QUOTE]
In both cases, you are referring to a specific type of singularity which has, in fact, been branded “The Technological Singularity.”
I am not prepared to argue that tech consciousness will emerge - my point is that, in the more general sense of singularity - a point in time in which deep, structural changes happen that change the nature of Human existence in fundamental way.
Nope. Agriculture, water power, steam, internal combustion engine, maybe. The internet? Massive computing power? I lived through the whole thing and I am not seeing it. Human existence has changed very little since I was a child in the 50s.
Wow - really? Perhaps that should be a different thread…I really feel like the internet has begat Globalization and a social-media world where everybody IS famous for 15 minutes and, and, and, and…it’s just *different. *
Less of a change than agriculture, but maybe bigger than steam. I was a child in the 1950s also. When I went to college, in the late '60s, I was almost totally cut off from my parents, though I was only about 200 miles away. One short call a week, maybe some letters. When my kids were in college they sent us their essays, could ask questions about some of their assignments, and we clearly talked a lot more. One daughter is in Germany now and we are much better connected to her than we were to our parents. Plus, they have big networks of everybody they’ve ever known. We lost touch with most of the people we know, they hardly lose touch with anyone unless they really want to.
That does not a singularity make, but it is a rather significant change.
Really. It’s different and mostly trivial. I went to blacks-in-the-balcony movie theaters, saw “whites only” water fountains, grew up in a neighborhood where all mothers were at home during the day, where high school dropouts were solidly middle class because of a steel mill. The internet is trivial. My job exists because of it, but my job is trivial.
The Sci-fi I have read defined the Singularity as a point in time when humanity will undergo a fundamental change due to technology. Neither nice clothes, computerized cars, supersonic airliners, nor multicolored toothpaste fundamentally changes what it means to be human.
Comprehensive genetic manipulation (methane breathing humans? Telepathy?), the fusion of electronic/mechanical devices with humans at the molecular level (cyborgs? A brain in a box? My consciousness copied/transferred into the internet, becoming a “ghost in the machine”? More machine than man, now…), medicine developed to the point of granting immortality, “Forbidden planet” level of (non) instrumentality…
Things like these can change humanity in ways we cannot predict.
Edit: Technology that allows us to reshape matter and energy at will… in any form, for any purpose, was the promise of the “Forbidden Planet” tech.
I don’t think we are there. As an example, a person walking around with a smartphone has a virtually limitless source of wisdom on them at all times. You can look almost anything up, and if you can’t you can find experts online and ask them. So arguably smartphones and other forms of communication tech have greatly enhanced our cognitive abilities. But I wouldn’t call it a singularity by any means. We are still years away from developing devices that can understand and solve our problems far better than we can. We are in the early stages of the singularity, but not the singularity itself.
Disagree vigorously. Already, computers are doing things we can’t. They may only do simply addition…but they do it so many billions of times a second, the results transcend their “programming.”
Go ahead, do the special effects animation in a modern movie…by hand. I’ll watch.
When Word makes a suggestion based on the context of what you’re writing: that is AI. Very damned simple, but it’s making a decision based on the content of the information. The Google smart-search is also remarkable: it goes beyond mere pattern-matching. It’s pattern-matching with recognition of meaning.
We’re going to see a LOT more of this. It will get better and better. And faster. And, ultimately, wiser.
I think it might be difficult to know if we’re in “the” tech singularity, however that manifests. Wiki tells me the Industrial Revolution took place from 1760ish to 1820 or 1840ish, Did people in 1780 know they were in the IR? Likewise, if the singularity began in, say, 2000, the transformation might take several decades to complete. Yes, I know the singularity is represented as an inflection point in popular thought, but I think it would be more like an inflection curve or bubble or sieve, one that would take time to pass though. Do I personally think we’re in that elbow leading singularness? No, I do not, but I think it’s likely that I wouldn’t think so even if we were.
The Internet, smart phones, and everything else were envisioned as long as a century ago; all it took was a means of figuring out how to do it. Therefore, these things were ipso facto not unimaginable ahead of time. When I hear talk about the singularity, however it’s defined, I see that it implies that the post hoc transformation is literally unimaginable.
(“I don’t know. I can imagine quite a bit.” Han Solo.)
Fifty years ago, gay marriage would have been “unimaginable” in one sense of the word. (In another sense, entirely imaginable…but not realistically predictable.)
The internet was envisioned…but not the vast migration of our economy onto it. Cell phones were envisioned…but not their use in tracking down suspects in a bombing. (Somehow, personal portable phones, in sf, never had cameras too!)
The “singularity” as Vernor Vinge (one of its creators) sees it is simply the extrapolation of the increasing rate of change. Moore’s Law, etc. Huge jumps in computing power are being made in shorter and shorter periods of time. At some point, something has to change. Exponential curves cannot continue indefinitely.
(The human population curve has hit a “singularity” of sorts…by slowing down. Well, it beats catastrophic collapse, eh?)
This needs to be repeated over and over in this thread. “The Singularity” is a fiction that some idiots use to make themselves feel smart. They see it and you don’t, so they’re smart.
No, they’re just good at spinning fictional stories.