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Josseppie, this thread has gone on for over 600 posts, most of them by you postulating your certainty that the singuarity WILL occur exactly when you say it will. You seem to be the only person who is building and stocking a singularity shelter, everyone else (even Vinge, Kurtzweil and Von Neumann) merely views it as a potentiality that might occur in a perfect storm of events if nothing occurs to subvert the trend.
Please sum it up once and for all by refuting, with scientific arguments, these noted thinkers who disagree with you:
Don't just say you've already explained all of that, nobody has time to read 600 posts. Tell us, concisely and convincingly, how the critics in this link are wrong.
First off let me correct something. Venor Vinge and especially Ray Kurzweil are certain the singularity will occur. Venor says by 2030 while Ray maintains it will be 2045. I have studied what both of them say and they are both correct. The reason is Venor is going by the "main stream" date when computers have sufficiently merged with humans to cause life to be different enough to be the singularity. Where Ray, being a engineer, uses a date where one computer that costs 1,000 dollars wil be a billion times more intelligent then all the humans on the planet today combined. That is why when ever I talk about the singularity I use both dates, 2030-2045.
As far as the critics. Can you give me the top 3 (up to 5 if you want) that most interest you and I will be more then happy to address it.
Last edited by Josseppie; 07-11-2013 at 07:45 AM..
First off let me correct something. Venor Vinge and especially Ray Kurzweil are certain the singularity will occur. Venor says by 2030 while Ray maintains it will be 2045. I have studied what both of them say and they are both correct. The reason is Venor is going by the "main stream" date when computers have sufficiently merged with humans to cause life to be different enough to be the singularity. Where Ray, being a engineer, uses a date where one computer that costs 1,000 dollars wil be a billion times more intelligent then all the humans on the planet today combined. That is why when ever I talk about the singularity I use both dates, 2030-2045.
As far as the critics. Can you give me the top 3 (up to 5 if you want) that most interest you and I will be more then happy to address it.
Let me get this straight. YOU have studied what Kurzweil says, and concluded that HE is correct? Have you told him that?
Just pick several critics of your choice and tell me why they are wrong. why their assumptions or data are invalid or not relevant.
Did any of the very early proponents give a date of, like, 2012?
I was on my I Phone before so I was unable to really make a good post. I am now on my main computer so I am able to do a more detailed post.
I read the criticism and it boils down to 5 major criticisms that I will address. Keep in mind that Ray Kurzweil address them scientifically in his books and documentaries while mine will be more simple because I am not a engineer.
They are:
1) Non information technology versus information technology.
Growing up I never paid much attention to predictions of the future just would watch like I watched any good movie because it is impossible to know with 100% certainty what will happen. Information technology is different and people in the computer industry have been predicting how they will advance for decades. That is why games and applications come out at the right time so what Ray is doing is nothing new. He is taking accepted laws and principals and instead of forecasting out a few years forecasting out a few decades. However if anyone goes beyond information technology it still holds true that we can not predict what will happen. So yes we will know what computers will be doing in 2020 no we do not know if it will be Apple or IBM or Intel making the computer.
As a side note when I first heard about the singularity my thought was WTH is he talking about but it did peak my interest so I began studying it and that is when I fully realized that yes you can predict with accuracy how information technology will advance.
2) Technological unemployment:
I post about this issue constantly as I think this is going to be a major problem facing society in the next 10 to 20 years.
I can see it in the city where I live as the steel mill is the most profitable it has ever been yet only employs a little over 1,000 people compared to the 7,000 to 10,000 people in the 1950's and 1960's. However forecasting what is going to happen falls outside of information technology so we can try but there is no way to know for sure. I read pessimists who say the entire economy will collapse and others who say we will move into a whole new economy and others say new jobs will be created. I happen to be in the camp that believe we are in the start of what will be a entire transformation of the economy and this is not new as we have done it before just not at the rapid speed we are doing it now. That is one reason I say the singularity is going to start by 2030 as I think from that point on everything from the economy to computers merging with humans and robots and AI will make life so different that if any person got transported from before 2030, say 1960, they would have no clue on how we were living.
3) Cultures exceed sustainability causing them to collapse.
The best way to talk about this is to show a video from Dr. Peter Diamandis.
4) We are not advancing exponentially and could be declining.
Of all the criticism this to me is the weakest. When you look at what computers have done since 1900 it is obvious they have advanced exponentially. To show you using graphs and models let me post a video of Ray Kurzweil that I really like as it is short and to the point.
5) The transition from the current paradigm to the next one will not be smooth causing computers to stop advancing exponentially.
This is the one criticism that I give a second look and that is Mores law will end when the current paradigm ends in the 2020's and computers will stop advancing exponentially. I am referring to the integrated circuit. However we are already working on the next paradigm, 3 dimensional self organizing molecular circuits. So just like in the past when one paradigm ran out and we just moved to the next paradigm without missing a beat I think the same will happen this time. Ray, also, talks about this in the video I posted but for a scientific look at what they are doing with the 3 dimensional self organizing molecular circuits I decided to post a article.
Here is a article from MIT news in 2010 on the topic:
The features on computer chips are getting so small that soon the process used to make them, which has hardly changed in the last 50 years, won’t work anymore. One of the alternatives that academic researchers have been exploring is to create tiny circuits using molecules that automatically arrange themselves into useful patterns. In a paper that appeared Monday in Nature Nanotechnology, MIT researchers have taken an important step toward making that approach practical.
Let me get this straight. YOU have studied what Kurzweil says, and concluded that HE is correct? Have you told him that?
Just pick several critics of your choice and tell me why they are wrong. why their assumptions or data are invalid or not relevant.
Did any of the very early proponents give a date of, like, 2012?
Some people argue that we have already hit the singularity we just don't know it. They argue that we are so connected to our technology that if someone came from say 1963 they would not understand it. While I can see their point, as the I phone alone would be hard to explain, I still don't believe that we are sufficiently advanced to be in the singularity. I think once we do hit the singularity it will be obvious and things will be moving so fast there will be no denying it. People like Ray and Venor have been consistent on the dates and like I have posted I think both are right.
The singularity is a difficult concept to grasp. When I first heard about it last year I was going to see a movie and saw a preview for the Singularity is Near. My thought was what in the hell is he talking about and that stared my research on it that has not ended. At this point it is difficult for me to talk about the future on anything from medical science to the national debt without talking about the singularity. When i do I can see people glaze over because the concept is just hard to nail down especially when in the past no one knew how computers advanced so they threw out all these dates based nothing on except what they thought would happen. In my opinion Ray Kurzweil is a genius simply because he has been able to crunch all the numbers and come up with mathematical models on how information technology progresses. The law of accelerating returns really explains it perfectly as computers do not progress in a linear fashion the way we envision them to but exponentially and people just don't think that way thus when they think about how long it will take for computers to have the kind of capability it will take they envision hundreds or thousands of years not 30. I mean look at Star Trek as it was seen as the view of the future but even that show is the future seen from a liner perspective as we are already getting technology they were getting in the 23rd century.
I guess that was a long way of saying most people just don't grasp the implications of exponential versus liner advances in information technology.
For those of you who do not know what the singularity is this is a good short video to give you some understanding of the topic.
One more thing I want to add is going through transformation is something that happens to society every so often. That is why we have the stone age, bronze age, iron age, renaissance, industrial revaluation, computer age and now the singularity. if people from the earlier times would be brought the a later time they would not understand how society was functioning. I often wonder what people felt like at the end of a age and if they could see the new one coming just like we can. To be honest it kind of feels surreal, at least from my perspective.
There is a thread I started on the topic a while ago. Here is the link in case you want to see it:
What's forever? Personally I think that is a over used word. No matter how long someone lives they can't wake up and say I've done it I've lived forever. Instead what I have learned is to explain it this way. Currently our life span of 75-100 years is short and does not allow us to do all the things we would like. I mean I could live a million years and not explore 1/10 of the universe. So while my guess would be I don't want to live forever I do want to live long enough to explore all there is to be explored and learn all there is to learn. Is that 1 million years or 1 billion years or more? Honestly I do not know but I do know its well over 100 years.
They both look exactly like Moore's Law charts. But they do NOT continue until they reach a critical crash point at which all hell breaks loose and "the world become a different and unpredictable place", because the very existence of the increase places stress on a lot of different variables that do not cooperatively remain constant and let the Moore's Laws slope go on forever until the universe is no longer recognizable. Moore's Law slope will also reach a breaking point, because it does not drive the universe, the universe drives it, with a lot of complexities that affect everything else, including microprocessor capacity.
You have put ALL your faith in Moore's Law, but you are going to crash, because Moore's Law is no more certain about microprocessors than it was about sugar and natural gas. There has not been a "sugar singularity", for reasons analogous to what will truncate the microprocessor march to its singularity.
Actually those graphs are not a smooth progression but have peaks and valleys or are they exponintial but linear where information technology is a smooth exponential progression. Plus you can't just look at a graph and say because A grew and stopped so will B. You have to look at what caused both to grow or advance then you can determine if it will continue or stop. The bottom line. There is no Correlation between sugar and natural gas with how information technology advances.
That being said if the biggest fault you can find in the coming singularity is that More's law will not last then in a way I will agree with you. If More's law ends in the 2020's we will not reach the singularity. However if it continues as I predict it will then we will reach the singularity between 2030 and 2045.
Last edited by Josseppie; 07-11-2013 at 10:47 PM..
First off let me correct something. Venor Vinge and especially Ray Kurzweil are certain the singularity will occur. Venor says by 2030 while Ray maintains it will be 2045. I have studied what both of them say and they are both correct. The reason is Venor is going by the "main stream" date when computers have sufficiently merged with humans to cause life to be different enough to be the singularity. Where Ray, being a engineer, uses a date where one computer that costs 1,000 dollars wil be a billion times more intelligent then all the humans on the planet today combined. That is why when ever I talk about the singularity I use both dates, 2030-2045.
As far as the critics. Can you give me the top 3 (up to 5 if you want) that most interest you and I will be more then happy to address it.
Correction Venor believes it will occur by 2030 only if there are no obstacles; obstacles include economical collapse, super plague, nuclear holocaust, large meteor hitting the Earth, etc.
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