Thank you for bringing that up! So many people in cyberspace keep referring to “the Singularity” as if it were a given that there is a clear consensus understanding of what it is and what it impliess. Hell, I myself was unaware that the notion had an actual name until just a couple of years back. And yes, knowing for sure what is it that the Singularity involves and what would be its result, would be a huge stride in focusing as to what is it that has to be done to achieve it (or even if it’s worth a special effort).
I would tend to agree. I take it the OP has assessed his own prospects and decided that he’s got a better chance at doing his part as a footsoldier than as a strategic leader. But indeed the greater impact would come from directing resources to those who can do the work.
No, the absolute best thing you can do to hasten the Singularity is to stop learning anything at all about computers. The so-called Singularity is the point in the future at which computer technology has advanced so far as to be incomprehensible to someone living in the present. It’s continually moving into the future: For instance, right now we’re living in the Singularity, from the point of view of someone in the 1980s. If you keep up with advances in computing, then you’ll never reach the Singularity, because when the advances come, you’ll understand them. So the only way you can ever reach it is by stopping learning now, so eventually, you will be baffled.
This, incidentally, is why “singularity” is a misnomer. It’s actually just a horizon. Reaching the Singularity is like walking to the horizon: When you get there, you see that the horizon is still the same distance ahead of you.
The way you get a job at Google is to be pretty freakin smart. Go get a degree in Computer Science from MIT or Stanford. Or found an internet startup and get acquired by them.
Also, keep in mind the “singularity” or “nerd rapture” is not a single “thing” being built in some Google lab or Lockheed Martin skunkworks. It some point in the future where technology becomes sufficiently advanced and different from our own to the point that we will be unable to extrapolate future trends beyond it. Like the invention of the steam engine or personal computer.
I would argue that the company that will usher in the Geekpocolypse hasn’t been formed yet.
I’m not sure I would define “singularity” as you do, but I agree to a large extent with the “horizon” argument.
One can imagine hunter-gatherers from 10,000 years ago discussing the future and speculating as follows:
One can expect technology to increase exponentially, since an improvement in food gathering, hut building, etc. will free up more people to work on improving technology as opposed to spending their time hunting and gathering.
Eventually this will lead to a point where food and shelter are available in quantities where they are practically limitless, i.e. they can be given away for free.
After that, who knows what will happen? In any event, nobody will need to work anymore.
So from the point of view of the Stone Age, one can say that the Singularity has already taken place, at least in the West. And notwithstanding the epidemics of Type II Diabetes; heart disease; obesity; and so on, life is immeasurably better now than in the past – at least in the West.
Which brings me back to my original point: What exactly does the OP hope will be accomplished with the Singularity and what technologies would accomplish it?
The singularity (from what I understand of it) is based on the proposition that our problem solving abilities will continue to grow until they are so advanced we can create solutions and creations beyond what our biological brains can comprehend. The smartest people have an IQ about 4x higher than someone who is moderately retarded. So its not like human intelligence spans the entire spectrum of what is possible in the universe. That is a pretty narrow window.
Even if we didn’t get to the point of a singulariy, our problem solving skills are still going to improve over time due to technology. And those skills will involve (but not be limited to) fields related to the singularity like biology, neuroscience, AI, nanotech, computer science, etc.
The worst that can happen is a bunch of nerds devote billions of dollars and man hours into creating new technologies if hte singularity doesn’t happen.
But on a long enough timeline I find it inevitable that our machine enhanced/machine generated problem solving abilities will greatly surpass our innate biological problem solving abilities.
I don’t think this is like the rapture, you won’t find many singularians who think we should do nothing about peak oil or climate change. Many support investments in technologies to get around those problems too.
The OP: Stop thinking large. Think smaller. No one person is going to invent the singularity.
If you have the work skills to be hired at Google, terrific. But there are many steps between here and the singularity, and most of the work will done indirectly. Kevin Drum: Assuming that Moore’s Law doesn’t break down, this is how AI is going to happen. At some point, we’re going to go from 10% of a human brain to 100% of a human brain, and it’s going to seem like it came from nowhere. But it didn’t. It will have taken 80 years, but only the final few years will really be visible. As inventions go, video games and iPhones may not seem as important as radios and air conditioners, but don’t be fooled. As milestones, they’re more important. Never make the mistake of thinking that just because the growing intelligence of computers has been largely invisible up to now that it hasn’t happened. It has. Read the blog post: Why Artifical Intelligence Is Closer Than We Realize – Mother Jones
> The smartest people have an IQ about 4x higher than someone who is
> moderately retarded.
No, they don’t. There is no way to compare intelligence in terms of statements like “X is n times as smart as Y.” The number 160 may be 4 times the number 40, but that doesn’t mean that a person with an I.Q. of 160 is four times as smart as a person with an I.Q. of 40. That’s not what an I.Q. means. It merely places you on a normal curve. One person in 15,787 has an I.Q. of 160 or greater. One person in 15,787 has an I.Q. of 40 or less. I.Q.'s tell you nothing except how common or rare it is to find a person that smart. Even that assumes that I.Q. actually measures something useful, which isn’t completely accepted.
> So its not like human intelligence spans the entire spectrum of what is possible
> in the universe.
There’s no way to compare human intelligence with what it possible for other intelligent races on other planets or whatever. There’s no way to even know at present whether there are any other races anywhere. There’s no way to know if comparing the intelligence of other races with humans even makes any sense. More particularly, there’s no way to know if it even makes any sense to compare the intelligence of humans with computers.
Yeah but they don’t. Most people work at jobs that, individually, have little importance in the grand scheme of things other than giving them enough money to consume. In fact, the more we improve “hut building and food gathering” the more it seems like the more people we enable to consume even more resources.
Probably that’s why our stone-age friends optimistically believed that overabundance of food would surely arrive by 1 BC or so.
But seriously, I see your point but at the same time there is validity to the hunter-gathers’ speculation. For example, arguably a band of hunter-gatherers has basically no chance of inventing the Haber-Bosch process.
The problem is that while our capacity for problem solving and data crunching continues to grow, our judgment and common sense doesn’t. I raised this in another thread awhile ago, but for every pack of geniuses in Google, you have millions of morons posting their idiotic opinions on just about anything using that same technology.
We have the potential right now to make the world a much better place using existing technology. However we don’t because people are short-sighted, selfish, willfully misinformed or just plain dumb when it comes to using it.
Neither do I and I’m a reasonably smart and educated person. For every Fritz Haber, you have a million dumbasses.
We actually have passed a couple of “singularity” points, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis and the 1995 close call from a Norwegian rocket launch. The world exists, today, in a “singularity” of energy density. A small number of people control amounts of energy sufficient to destroy much of our civilization. The danger is largely under control, but not totally.
The idea of an informational singularity is, today, only science fiction, but that doesn’t mean that it is nonsensical, or even a “horizon” event that can only be approached asymptotically.
The information age has already made large changes in our society. The notion of “privacy” is coming close to extinction. That itself is a minor example of a technological singularity.
> One person in 15,787 has an I.Q. of 160 or greater. One person in 15,787 has
> an I.Q. of 40 or less.
Excuse me, those numbers aren’t right. Instead, one person in 31,574 has an I.Q. of 160 or greater. One person in 31, 574 has an I.Q. or 40 or less. One person in 15, 787 has an I.Q of either greater than or equal to 160 or less than or equal to 40.
Does it matter, most of us will never innovate anything. All we can do is go along for the ride while the wealthy and intelligent mold the world around us. That has always been the case. At least due to technology the world they mold will generally be better than the world of the past.
And the world has gotten a lot better due to technology. By almost every metric (except some environmental ones that are due to industrialization) life is better than in the recent past, which is better than the past going back further. That trend should continue.
If I’m just a figment of your imagination why are you surprised by what I said?
People on this board are not the elite of wealth and intelligence. People here are smart and financially secure, but there are few (probably no) people with $100 million+ in the bank, and probably few truly innovative types here.
Right. We happen to have chosen a scale for measuring intelligence where the mean is 100 and the standard deviation is 15. But we could instead have chosen a scale where the standard deviation is 20, in which case that same genius would have an IQ of 180 and the same moron would have an IQ of 20, and then say that the smartest is nine times the dumbest. Or we could have chosen a scale where the standard deviation is 1 point, in which case the genius would be a 104 IQ and the moron a 96, and say that the difference in intelligence is less than ten percent. Or we could have chosen a scale with 30 as the standard deviation, giving the genius a 220 and the moron a -20, making the genius… Negative eleven times smarter? And yet, we’re always talking about the same two people.
Yes ok I get your point. By whatever metric you use I do not think cognition is limited to what biology developed via natural selection. I’m sure there are many factors of higher problem solving skills that can be created.
