Read about Technological Singularity
It seem to me as a novice as a most plausible conclusion. Technology is always moving aehad why would it move into this direction?
Apart from if we all die you mean?
It’s entirely possible that there is some brick wall in technological progress that we don’t have the intelligence to pass, or even the intelligence to make the tools that can pass it. It’s possible that we may never be able to create a an artificial intelligence that’s smarter than we are for instance.
We’ve had this sorta discussion fairly frequently around these parts lately. Perhaps someone with a better search savey than me can link to them for you.
I am with Baboonanza on this one. IMO continued technological and intellectual progress to a"technological singularity level" is NOT a given. There appear to me to be significant real world limits on many fronts. I would go so far as to say that I think there is a good chance the world hundreds of years from now will not be that much different from today. Some things significantly better perhaps, but nothing that would be mind blowing to a modern person of today.
Count me in the camp that thinks something akin to a technological singularity is a low probability but its not impossible.
Because technological society will pass like a flash, and while we may be a few decades away from this singularity, I’m not about to bet on it. We’re already a few billion souls above the carrying capacity of this planet, and the nonrenewable resources we’re extracting to keep this bubble inflated is running out. Fast. Singularity is definitely possible, given time and resources, but while the former is effectively infinite, the latter is finite and dwindling. I don’t think any dei ex machina can save us, but I agree with the fundamental premise in your link: change will occur at ever-increasing rates, and that makes things increasingly more difficult to predict with any certainty.
If a machine were developed with greater problem-solving skills than a human brain, and it wound up designing other machines of superior intelligence, then that would be an unqualified miracle, but without the infrastructure to support it (like electrical generation, telecommunications, etc.), it would blink out in a flash. A supercomputer is nothing without a web of spare parts and uninterrupted power, not to mention any technicians (or automatons) to keep the machine running.
So, it might happen, but it’s likely to come tumbling down before we even know it happened.
Write down the most important technological innovations since 1900.
Now go look up the dates these items were first invented.
Really, do it. Its a pretty good exercise and only takes a few minutes.
I’d be close to certain your lists dates clusters pretty heavily pre-1950. The evidence that technological advancement is accelerating is pretty skimpy.
Seems to me that the OP is referring to the progress of technology, not much the development of newest forms of it. While technology is added to the definition, the focus is on the growth of it in relation to simulating or recreating human levels of intelligence.
Yeah, I’d say it’s a problem of resources. We may run out of resources before we can hit the singularity, and even if we don’t, I suspect the singularity won’t happen without some discovery of cheap energy which might never happen.
Okay, I’ll bite:
Aeroplane, light bulb, transistor, jet engine, helicopter, atomic power, radio communications, TV, are all between 1900 and 1950.
The motor vehicle, plastics, telephone, internal combustion engine, turbine, machine gun, Xrays, rockets, and electricity all pre-date 1900.
Despite being first explained in 1905, photovoltaics also predate 1900.
The biggest innovation since 1950, is, of course, the Internet. Then there’s human space travel, artificial satellites, supersonic travel, and Jump jets like the Harrier. But there are very many significant technological innovations which are usually invisible to us, like airbags, ejection seats, crush zones, and fire alarms.
Nor should we. That rarely ends well, as any sci-fi fan can tell ya.
But improving computation hasn’t led to an accelerated rate of technological development. We were advancing faster pre-computer, and then were doing better in the pre-transitor era of computation then we are now. Of course, maybe we will hit a point where computers do become enough such a boon that technological development takes off, but I’d say what historical evidence we have suggests that this isn’t the case.
Super-sonic flight was first achieved in 1947. But even of the post-1950 innovations, they all happened pretty early in the half-century. Human space travel and artificial satellites were in the 50’s and early 60’s, ARPANET came online in the late 60’s as did the earlier Harrier’s.
Of course I’m not saying that there hasn’t been any technological progress in the last few decades, but the really world changing innovations have been strongly clustered in the earlier part of the century.
Therein lies the fallacy of the argument.
In order to be meaningful, the comparison must be between technological advances made (for example) in 1990-2010 and recognized as significant during that period and technological advances made during (e.g.) 1940-1960 with the same proviso. Technological advances made during 1940-1960 and recognized as important a few decades later don’t count, unless you’re also going to count the things invented in 1990-2010 and recognized as important circa 2030 or so (and if you are, please let me know how you’re doing it, especially if your technique can be adapted to discover future Powerball numbers).
The problem with this argument is that it’s easy to look at technologies that are mature, and decide that they’ve changed the world. It’s not easy to look at newly emerging technologies and decide that they’re about to change the world.
The other thing is that inventions tend to get invented much much earlier than people think, the iconic example is television which was invented in the 20s, but then along came the Depression and WWII, and it wasn’t until the 1950s that TV started to penetrate the market. Or breech-loading firearms. Everyone could see for a hundred years how a breechloader would be a gigantic improvement, but no one could make one safe enough and cheap enough until many years of incremental improvments in metallurgy and machining.
You can look at just about every invention, and see a long period where the invention existed, but no one knew how to use it or market it economically, and the invention only really transformed things decades later when it became ubiquitous.
The supposed singularity is not about technology changing the world (which will happen) but a gap between the pre- and post-singularity worlds. That is the part I doubt, because change will be gradual, and there will be people comfortable on either side. Over enough time the gap gets wider, but I haven’t seen any real indication of what the gap looks like, except perhaps for most of the population vanishing like in the Vinge book.
It’s not that there’s a gap–it’s that the future becomes radically unpredictable because you can’t tell which out of dozens or hundreds of potentially game-changing technologies will pan out.
The singularity isn’t an event, it’s just a recongnition that at some point the future curves get so steep that they might as well be straight up.
Or maybe not, because as we tend to solve the easy problems first, and solving 100 easy problems results in a lot more improvement than solving 1 difficult problem, even if the difficult problem took 100 times the effort. So we may be looking at a sigmoid curve, rather than an exponential curve.
True enough, but I think the scale of the effect is big enough that even with the lag time between initial conception and widespread implementation, its still pretty obvious that technological innovation has slowed. 1960 was a long time ago, stuff invented then has had a long time to percolate, I’m pretty skeptical that its just the slowness of the rate that stuff “catches on” that has made that decade and its successors seem less inventive then the previous century. Of course, maybe it just slowed for a couple decades, and the period 2000-2010 actually will turn out to have yielded a bunch of inventions that we don’t know are important yet. But in anycase, I think enough time has passed that I feel confident saying the pace of innovation was higher in the first half of the twentieth century then the second half, and that enough time has passed since 2000 that this isn’t just a selection effect due to the slowness of the importance of inventions being realized making more recent decades seem less technologically progressive.
Well, let me give an example. My wife and I have been rewatching Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And it was released only 10 years ago. Except just about every episode someone gets in trouble and has to get in touch with character Y to warn them about the horrible thing that’s going to happen. Except they can’t, because character Y isn’t home! Oh noes! None of these characters have cell phones. And it is jarring.
Now, a cell phone is just a phone. Not that much different from a landline. Except it is.
Yea, again, I’m not saying there haven’t been any big technological innovations since 1950. There have. Cel phone are a good example, as are the pill, the internet, genetic engineering (DNA wasn’t proved to be the herditray molecule till 1952) and I’m sure we can come up with a lot more. But if you ask someone to list what the biggest innovations have been 1900-2000, the large majority will be clustered prior to 1950.
If I look out past a few miles away, I just don’t see any land. Does that mean that if I walk more than a few miles in a straight line, that I’ll fall off the edge of the Earth? Of course not. There will be brand new horizon a few miles in front of me, replacing the old horizon, and at the same distance.
Then we’ve already gone through the singularity. Who can tell which technology will pan out today? Even in electronics we have quantum stuff, continued silicon stuff, MEMs for mechanical stuff, and perhaps biocomputing. Or computing witn nanotubes.
There is also synergy between improvements. You have small computers which you can put into TVs. You have the Internet and high bandwidth. Voila, you can download movies right to your TV.
It is nothing new. I wrote a story on exactly this topic in 1968, which got published in my high school science magazine. Anyone looking at a technology curve might wonder what happens when it goes straight up. My protagonist is talking to a girl on a videophone and ordering stuff on line - and it ends when they invent a teleporter for faster delivery, and the update cycle gets so fast that he gets buried in new versions.
Silly me for not building an industry on this concept.