9th April 2009, 12:15 PM
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.
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.
"On two occasions, I have been asked [by members of Parliament], 'Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question." ~ Charles Babbage (1791-1871)