The Singularity is Near?

[Weltall]

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.

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.

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.

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.