Tendo City

Have any of you armchair philosophers ever read the works of Ray Kurzweil, or are familiar with the concept of the technological singularity?

Kurzweil is an AI specialist and has written several books regarding the singularity, the point at which human consciousness merges with computer intelligence to create a 'transcendent' existence. Kurzweil predicts the singularity to be possible roughly in 2045, based upon technology evolving in exponential manner.

I found some his stuff online a while back, it mostly gives me nightmares.

in the next 5 years we'll see computers faster than the human brain at walmart for sale. I think we'll also see a revolution in storage that moves us in to the gigs per second as standard, with teras not far beyond. I think within our lifetimes we'll probably be wiped out by super intelligent robots.

On one hand, I dont think it will ever be possible. Too many moral complications. But a bio-organic computer that can interact directly with our minds will get here one way or the other, the rest will be on culture and you can bet porn will be a driving force. It will open up a limitless problem and I can totally see it becoming illegal and controlled, then explode in infinite directions. There's a possibility, for example, that in our lifetimes we can link two consciousness's together not unlike the first intranet between schools. From there, you could possibly join a world wide web that exists solely in the mind. Nightmare fuel.... intangibly holistic nightmare fuel.

On one hand, it will start like the brain eating experiments whre a rat runs a maze until he knows it completely, then have his brain fed to another rat to see if by digesting the brain he can acquire the knowledge the previous rat had. Strangely enough it does work. Imagine the experiments now - A man has a needle pierce his finger but a woman in a different state feels it. A person connected and capable of anything, knows everything in recorded science, art, history, mathematics. I mean Jesus Christ, imagine the backlash. Making our children 'impure' by the thoughts of others, or making it illegal for them to connect so they try even harder to get on it. 7 year olds with more knowledge than a college professor and capable of recalling any other person's experiences. It will start so simple and innocent and it will snowball out of control.

On the other hand... imagine just 30 years from now and replacing, recalling and erasing memories is a real part of our lives, minus the trip to Mars (probably). Access in education going from what you can read in a few years time, to what can be implanted in seconds. Our kids could buy an instrument and receive lessons in to their mind. Playing Chopin the same day they touched a piano for the first time. And not a single person is dressed exclusively in pleather or taking any pills.

Imagine a 16 year old who does in fact know everything. When I try to imagine that society I get visions of prosperity and hell on earth. But still, its cultural. Messing and interacting with brainwaves externally? Through devices? "Altering our minds" and 'expanding our consciousness"? What would it do to someone's personality? Would you, once you connect to it, effectively 'die', and be replaced with a new and different personality and identity? We do that through life, but this would be in the course of a few minutes, not years and not just your life but everyone in the hive.

When the first successful attempts become known, there will be a moral backlash that could sink it before it ever reaches its potential.

It would destroy God and religion, separating the people from actual faith and the followers just looking for answers... who will find them all. It has the ability to become a huge mirror for us all to actually see ourselves for once. I wouldn't doubt the possibility of mass suicides at all, wars will be raged as dictators who wont even educate their own people of the world outside their own connect and explore data, experiences and emotion of a collective hive mind. I want so badly to be there to see the look on the faces of racists and womanizers as they realize what they are. The pedophiles, the drug abusers and alcoholics all staring deep in to the ocean of answers where we each have the education of an experienced psychologist, every vein of therapist, psychoanalyst and more and we can compare our findings with nutrition, exercise and physical health all in our heads within seconds. While simultaneously exploring the emotional constructs of every person connected to it.

It's too much for me to fathom. But the potential for greatness, tangible hope? :P I bet when it does start, it can be a subject or idea a time. So doctors will be great doctors but suck at concert flute like they always did, geneticists will be the best can be but have no idea how to fix a car. It's probably a few hundred years away before we can actually share consciousness on a large scale with a world wide mind. But it will start with interacting directly with the brains and that's within our lifetimes imo.

Moral? I'm sick of people going on about how something isn't "natural" and then claiming that that makes it immoral. Who cares how natural or unnatural something is labelled to be? Further, if someone wants to modify their body or join a collective willingly, more power to them. It's not my business to stop them. New technology always eliminates jobs, I wouldn't call that immoral, especially if it ever did just replace ALL manual labor except that which some people just flat enjoy doing. The only moral issues would be if someone was forcing someone else to upgrade. And no, "force" doesn't mean that you can't "keep up" with people. You might as well say society forced you to get a car or a cell phone and that's immoral.

There are some big problems here. For one, we're hitting "the bottom" of processor scale. I'm sure I'm not the only one who's noticed the jumps in processing speed have slowed down in recent years. There's physical barriers to overcome. For now, they've been overcoming it by just adding more processing cores.

However, that's not even the major problem. You can't just stick together a million processors and say you have a brain. It's a matter of programming. The amount of design we have to catch up with to reach the level of software in our own brains is staggering. Further, there are some things further than neural connections. These virtualized brains also have to simulate the chemical wash our brains use, endorphins and hormones and such, which significantly alter the rate of neural transmission in ways that are important if the simulation is to be accurate. This will take a long time. I'd put it safely on the other side of all our deaths, even if I'd rather not. Believe it or not, the brain is pretty dang complicated. To use an analogy, you can't string together a billion NES systems and get a 360, it's a bit more complicated than that. Plus, you run an NES game on a 360 (assuming you've got all the machine codes translated via emulation) and all you'll get is that NES game. It won't suddenly become a fully 3D rendered online experience.

There's one major problem left with this. This singularity idea, if it came to pass, would vastly improve our ability to colate data. However, it can only do that with existing data. No matter how powerful a computer is, in the end to find out things we don't know about our own universe, we have to do experiments IN our own universe. A simulation only gives us answers we already know about. It can make unusual predictions, but if we haven't observed those predictions in reality, they're just artifacts of the simulation. Whenever a theory makes a powerful prediction of something unusual, it must be tested. That's why there are STILL experiments testing einstein's relativity. Relativity is pretty well accepted as a description for things on the larger scale. It also leads to certain predictions of unusual behavior. Those can't just be accepted by fiat though, because if those predictions weren't true, relativity would need to be revised to fit it.

What a super intelligent machine would do for us is allow us to compare large amounts of data much more quickly than normal, but in terms of learning new things about the universe, it at best points us to new ideas for experiments, and experiments are going to take as long as they have to take given whatever's being tested for.

This is true for medicine as well. Simulations will get us only so far in telling us what certain medicines will do. The fact is, we don't know everything about how cellular interactions work. We can't MAKE a fully accurate simulation yet, even if we did have super powerful computers, so we need to continue testing actual living things.

The singularity is more or less just another "end times and then heaven" only for the cybers.

Quote:What a super intelligent machine would do for us is allow us to compare large amounts of data much more quickly than normal, but in terms of learning new things about the universe, it at best points us to new ideas for experiments, and experiments are going to take as long as they have to take given whatever's being tested for.

Well yes and no. No matter the connections, if something isn't known it will remain unknown, until it is known. The principal in theory would be that all the answers are already here but it (the data) hasn't been combined yet in to a cohesive package. Ultimately, there is a handful of people working on AIDS research. Those people once connected, could drastically cut down their research time because everything *already* known would be in their heads as instinctive thought. Just as you know the parts of a cell by looking at a photo of a cell without seeing the parts because you studied it prior. That knowledge becomes inherent. So, perhaps by combining all known facets of recorded anything, answers might suddenly become highlighted with a cartoon-like slap to the forehead followed by an "OF COURSE!"

Quote:Moral? I'm sick of people going on about how something isn't "natural" and then claiming that that makes it immoral. Who cares how natural or unnatural something is labelled to be? Further, if someone wants to modify their body or join a collective willingly, more power to them. It's not my business to stop them. New technology always eliminates jobs, I wouldn't call that immoral, especially if it ever did just replace ALL manual labor except that which some people just flat enjoy doing. The only moral issues would be if someone was forcing someone else to upgrade. And no, "force" doesn't mean that you can't "keep up" with people. You might as well say society forced you to get a car or a cell phone and that's immoral.

It's here to stay. We put programs on our pc's to make sure people we deem 'Too fragile' in our homes cannot access ...whatever we deem that could 'harm' them. Hardcore porn for little Johnny and Suzy? Maybe not a good idea. But blocking them from reading about sex and passion? We'll buy Suzy a doll so her instinct to mother and explore her feelings of child rearing can be nurtured and developed but she cant read about her own freakin vag?

Not to mention on this world wide mind you could theoretically have access to memories and emotions. So if it had an interface similar to windows imagine clicking on 'orgasms' and feeling a female orgasm (even though you're a man... right?). This will revolutionize mankind's understanding. Now imagine little Suzy gets on there, gets curious, and now knows what its like to be in a 7-man gangbang all-female bukkake tag-team reverse anal Polish pie live-hentai forced-fictional-beastiality-breakfast mascot porn and cries because it was scary. "My child's innocence is ruined! - its the same as if she were raped!" blahby blah. Of course this brings up the whole issue of sexual intercourse without the use of genitals or physical stimulation. E-Rape? I think so. But yeah, definitely a beautifully woven tapestry of shit for all the moralfags to bite in to.

Can anyone find that article that made the rounds for a while about computer processors made of human brain tissue and the whole synthetic neuron uber cpu's?

Morality issues aside, he explains in his book that we often limit ourselves when making predictions because we often assume that the future will not be much different from the present. He mentions S-curves in evolution, both biological and technological, how all processes of advancement level off for a time, and then some breakthrough occurs and the rate of change increases even more. Our ability to create more efficient processors is currently stuck in one of these S-curves. Sooner, rather than later, a method will be developed to overcome our current shortcomings. Replicating the human brain will not happen by stringing together a trillion current processors. It will happen using technology more advanced than what exists today. And the technology will come.

It may seem unlikely given our current technology, but that's our limitation of prediction at workd. If you were to tell a person living in the year 1850 that we invented little devices that utilize invisible waves, and with them we can talk to someone on the other side of the world as if they stood next to us, they would think the same thing. If you told a man living at the time of Christ that we can not only fly through the clouds but above them, that we invented vehicles to take ourselves to the very moon, he would think it impossible.

As for the morality, after reading "The Singularity is Near", Kurzweil favors technology augmenting our current state of being rather than replacing it entirely. Surely this is only one possible outcome, but hardly the least possible, and the reason I'm fascinated by the idea. Technology will be only what we allow it to be, and perhaps it's healthy that we've long been mistrustful of technology, feeding ourselves a steady diet of technological dystopiae in the vein of the Terminator and Blade Runner, because that fear will help us limit the mistakes we might make. This future won't be a utopia (Kurzweil himself never uses the term), but it will be a leap up the evolutionary ladder that hasn't been seen since a group of hairless apes figured out how to make fire. Morality itself will change, as morality so often has over the course of history.

There is going to be a movie regarding Kurzweil and his works within the concept of the Singularity.

"Transcendent Man"

postscript: The idea that the Singularity is 'rapture for nerds' is entirely untrue. Those of us who desire such an outcome desire that a massive paradigm shift is going to solve many of the problems we have today, but I don't think any of us believe it is a substitute for eternal heaven, or that it will automatically make us perfect. On the contrary, we will find ourselves challenged by entirely new problems and quandaries. When we evolved to use fire and tools, we abrogated much of the problems we had as tree apes, only to present ourselves with new problems of social interaction, and eventually politics, morality, and religion.

The Singularity is not an end. It is a step forward on the evolutionary ladder. Well, it's more realistically a quantum leap on the ladder, honestly. It is not, however, a conclusion to evolution, nor is it nerd heaven. These are terms thrown about by skeptics.

The 'bottom of the processor scale' appears to be a barrier on the verge of shattering.

A material called Graphene has been developed, which is a single carbon atom in thickness, is stronger than diamond while possessing the flexibility of plastic, and, most importantly, conducts electricity a hundred times more efficiently than silicon. Using this technology to create graphene nanotubes may well pave the way to three-dimensional computing and give us at least the hardware necessary to meet (and surpass) the hardware of the human brain.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphene

That's been in the building stages forever, I really hope they can get it fully functional.

I hate how the term evolution is being used in terms of computers, you cant manipulate DNA or introduce man-made biologically-based technology in to an animal and pass it off as evolution. Blah.

It would be nerd heaven for sure though, dont you think? By nerds, I mean people who are happier on their computer integration than in society. the biggest problem is the same that's happening with computers and the internet today. Morality will advance and change, but rape, murder, pedophilia and so on will always be in the top tier of worries concerning any technology that integrates us further in to a collective. Japan, the entire country, just recently banned 'rape simulation' games and hey, it only took them 30 years to do something about them. It's already recorded in libraries where 'questionable' books are removed completely. And the 'questionable' in question can be anything deemed to be of and/or related to any subject deemed inappropriate which could even coincide with religious or political beliefs. And that leads to the other side of the spectrum: Extremists who leisurely and purposefully seek out the questionable and create an underground as entertainment.

The underground of the internet is a scary, scary (incredibly funny) place. That, on a scale of direct interaction to the human brain, even manipulating brainwaves, is going to impact everything so fast it will be ridiculous. Once the open market can get its hands on it, and is somehow made in to porn... it's all over. The tech will aid us in everything, streamlining our lives. But we'll all hide in secret, downloading the memories of a hot lesbian masturbating when she was 16 with her math teacher during a ski trip. Or 'reading' the recorded data of what it feels like to have you legs removed by a saw, or even tricking our brains to recall the memory of someone else being high on a particular drug. Can 'waking' dreams be illegal?

Getting back to our lifetime, I cant wait for the first experimental man-made brains or brain pieces. But with our current state, we dont even know how the more complicated brain works, hell we dont even know what exactly it is we're sending and receiving across all those neurons. There's a wall to climb.

lazyfatbum Wrote:That's been in the building stages forever, I really hope they can get it fully functional.

I hate how the term evolution is being used in terms of computers, you cant manipulate DNA or introduce man-made biologically-based technology in to an animal and pass it off as evolution. Blah.

Why not? It accomplishes the same effects that billions of years of natural evolution have done, without having to wait through an epoch to see results. Humans evolved to possess this capability, so why are the results of that evolution somehow not on the same level?

If anything, what we're doing is far beyond the relatively primitive evolution created by biological accident.

Quote:It would be nerd heaven for sure though, dont you think? By nerds, I mean people who are happier on their computer integration than in society. the biggest problem is the same that's happening with computers and the internet today. Morality will advance and change, but rape, murder, pedophilia and so on will always be in the top tier of worries concerning any technology that integrates us further in to a collective. Japan, the entire country, just recently banned 'rape simulation' games and hey, it only took them 30 years to do something about them. It's already recorded in libraries where 'questionable' books are removed completely. And the 'questionable' in question can be anything deemed to be of and/or related to any subject deemed inappropriate which could even coincide with religious or political beliefs. And that leads to the other side of the spectrum: Extremists who leisurely and purposefully seek out the questionable and create an underground as entertainment.

I would classify "heaven" or "rapture" as events that lead to an eternity without problems or conflicts or challenges. Certainly, this kind of future would appeal most to the nerds, but that's because the nerds are the ones making this happen. This will be a future of unparalleled change and advancement, but it's not going to lead to "heaven" or anything like perfection. We're going to solve many problems we face today, and find that we'll be facing problems we may not even be aware of yet.

Quote:The underground of the internet is a scary, scary (incredibly funny) place. That, on a scale of direct interaction to the human brain, even manipulating brainwaves, is going to impact everything so fast it will be ridiculous. Once the open market can get its hands on it, and is somehow made in to porn... it's all over. The tech will aid us in everything, streamlining our lives. But we'll all hide in secret, downloading the memories of a hot lesbian masturbating when she was 16 with her math teacher during a ski trip. Or 'reading' the recorded data of what it feels like to have you legs removed by a saw, or even tricking our brains to recall the memory of someone else being high on a particular drug. Can 'waking' dreams be illegal?

Considering the very nature of the experience, I can't imagine they would be. The reason the term Singularity is used is because this will reach a point where changes happen faster than a current person can keep up with them. With an astronomical singularity, it's almost impossible to know what happens within (or past) it, because gravity is so powerful that it retains all information within. The best we can do is guess, and the best guess is that things will eventually be so different that our very way of thinking as we know it may no longer apply.

Quote:Getting back to our lifetime, I cant wait for the first experimental man-made brains or brain pieces. But with our current state, we dont even know how the more complicated brain works, hell we dont even know what exactly it is we're sending and receiving across all those neurons. There's a wall to climb.

We're getting ever closer, though. Our ability to scan the human brain is constantly improving. Recently, a scan was able to detect a thought process, i.e., the formation of neural pathways that forms as a part of the learning process. Neural scanning resolution is always increasing, and when nanotechnology matures, it will be possible to non-invasively scan a brain from within. At that point, reverse-engineering of the human brain will simply be a matter of time.

The problem with most people is that we tend to view the future in a linear sense. We predict the next fifty years of progress based upon the last fifty years of progress, which is inherently faulty. In a technological sense, we've advanced as much in the last ten years as we did in the previous hundred. In the last hundred years, we advanced ten times as much as we did in the previous thousand. Computers are the prime example. Some say that Moore's Law will run out of steam in the next decade because there is a finite point at which silicon circuits can no longer be improved. This is absolutely correct, but many of these same people believe that computers cannot improve past this point, and this is inherently false. Moore's Law predates the integrated circuit by decades. Integrated circuits are merely the fifth paradigm in computer technology. It really began with punch card systems and tabulators in the late 19th century, and ever since then, not only has the ability to process information has been increasing, but the rate of increase has itself been increasing.



There are several different systems being developed, and at least one of them will one day render the integrated circuit obsolete and continue to propagate Moore's Law, among them computers that operate on photonic or quantum principles, both of which promise performance that is potentially greater than silicon by a matter of exponents.

I'm glad someone finally responded. I thought a technologically-savvy bunch like you guys would be more interested.

I haven't finished the The Singularity is Near. I stopped reading for one reason or another.

I was peeved to discover that my personal copy of the book was missing some seventy pages. I'll have to buy it again, because that's a whole 20% of the book I was denied.

^Did you order it off of Amazon?

No, I bought it at Barnes and Noble, about a year ago.

^Always go with Amazon. I've never had a problem ordering books from them.

I'm too much 'instant gratification' to buy books online if I can find it in the store.

Besides, I didn't even notice I was missing the pages until the second time I read it. It wasn't a matter of the pages being removed or the book being damaged in any way. It was simply a manufacturing error.