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Comment by tommorris | Hacker News Reader

Widespread adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop. (Prompted by...)

Widespread adoption of LISP by developers. (Both of which cause...)

The Singularity! (But, sadly, Ray Kurzweil dies a few days before the Singularity happens.)

Okay, okay, prediction is a mugs game.

Democracy in Iran would be nice. I'm not sure why I need a customised personal display on my refrigerator. Cheaper displays and other computing devices would be nice - as would a stable, clean energy supply to power them with.

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Reasonable timeline estimates I've heard for singularity precipitating events (human uploading, human level AI) are in the 15-30 year range weighted early, and these aren't handwaves meaning "we don't know", but, respectively, predictions from the microscopy/neuroscience/compute-power needed to scan and emulate a brain, and from the neuroscience/compute-power needed to figure out the brain's abstract algorithms and copy them.

Still outside the range of one decade. Call this one "prelude to singularity".

You'll have to link brain emulation to an increase in intelligence though. For all you know a simulated brain is going to end up being retarded or anti-social or pathological.

Neither of those would have any measurable effect on how we live, the 'superhuman intelligence' is actually the least likely outcome, at least in the beginning of this.

It might happen, but I don't think it is very likely.

Brain emulations don't have to be smarter than humans to be superhuman, they can be merely more numerous and/or quicker.

The time frame for proper AI not via emulation is actually shorter, cf Shane Legg's peak probability estimate of 18 years. This is because the mechanisms of learning and processing in the brain are well under way to being understood, and they will lead to copycat software using similar conventional "narrow AI" algorithms. These also have a greater potential than neural snapshots to be scaled up fast.

Unfortunately none of the above helps towards making "friendly" AI (that is, avoiding creating a superintelligence whose value system is inimical to ours). This ought to be a serious worry.

In order to worry about Friendliness, you have to be first (otherwise it was pointless, as whether the first mover's AI was Friendly is what matters). So, you have to be relatively confident that you're already going to be first in order to spend much time researching Friendliness. I only know of one group that appears to be confident in that way (SIAI), and I have no reason to think that their confidence is less misplaced than all the other people who've been convinced they'd figured it out.

From the outside, SIAI seems torn along a Goertzel-Yudkowsky axis, with BG saying "whee, this is fun, lets build it", and EY too busy saving the world to panic. But the man himself reads Hacker News, so I'll shut up.

Let me guess... You'll be retired at nearly the same time you predict the singularity will occur?

I will be in my 50s, but retiring ever is not in my expected future. That is, I expect some lifespan extending tech (singularity or SENS) to run ahead of me.

I hope you are correct. I still boot my MacBook to OS X sometimes, but universal use of Linux in the cloud, private servers, and on the desktop will lead to lowering computing costs and produce more solid software. re: Lisp: that would be nice :-)

re: singularity: a friend and sometimes colleague who is one of the most far thinking and creative AI people I know is likely to move to China because of their willingness to fund long term AI research. I have a gut feeling that Roger Penrose may be correct that conventional computers may be incapable of consciousness but, quantum computing may take care of that.

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