In the Singularity Movement, Humans Are So Yesterday
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
I don't think we can know whether a singularity is possible until it's upon us, which could be never. I'm singularity agnostic. That doesn't mean we don't think hard about it. That doesn't mean we don't guard ourselves against its perceived dangers. It does mean that we keep our heads and stay skeptical and put out the fires that are already burning.
In all seriousness, though, the parallels between some forms of Rapture philosophy and some forms of Singularity philosophy are pretty strong. Uploading your mind into a machine is very similar to being taken up to heaven.
Back in the 90s, as a callow teenager, I happened to be lurking on a mailing list for transhumanists. One day someone on the list, well known to many of the others, died. "Fortunately", as the announcement to the list said, "his body was cryogenically frozen, so we'll all see him again after the singularity!" This was followed by a bunch of posts expressing confidence that this would indeed happen.
It was roughly at this point that I decided that these people may be somewhat disconnected from reality, and living in a fantasyland of what they'd like to be true -- while I admit it's possible that this guy will one day be revived, there's no goddamn reason to have any confidence in it happening.
How about firing up a potentially runaway AI without a stable goal system? Releasing a virus to "improve" people in the releasers' preferred direction? The likelihood of these seems minor (and for the first, might not even been possible), but the consequences are so grave that they bear some thought and worry anyway.
One thing that clears up some confusion is the important point that the word "Singularity" means different things to different people. http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
It's easy enough to buy into a reduction of the basic singularity tenants: a) that we'll understand and be able to model the brain at some point, and b) that at that point evolution can proceed on, well, non-evolutionary time scales.
But it's always seemed to me like that step will have a tragic quality to it as well: that's the day humans become just animals. I don't know why a post-human intelligence would feel a need to preserve human individuals or the human concept of self any more than we feel the need to preserve gerbil personalities.
I don't even get that far. It may be the case that it's impossible to model the brain to a sufficient level of detail to manufacture conciousness. It may even be the case that our brains are doing something non-computable to produce consciousness, in which case we have to give up on Turing-equivalent machines entirely and move to something that more closely resembles our physical brains. At that point Singularity-scale intelligence depends on the creation of some big-brained biotech Frankenstein, which doesn't scale nearly as well, and seems different enough to require a new name. We just don't know.
On one hand it's good to see that the subject get's into mainstream media.
On the other hand. The subject is dealt with quite simplistically. And the focus on Kurzweil is giving the story a very one sided and kind of geeky don't take too serious kind of angle.
I realize that even a newspaper like the NYT can't get too nerdy. But there are far more important stories to talk about when it comes to transhumanism even if the singularity doesn't happen. (I am personally skeptic)
I would though make one book advice that isn't following any specific school of thought. Hans Movarec: "Robot - Mere machine to transcend mind"
Maybe people who takes his over-optimistic predictions seriously will work harder to drive innovation?
I assume someone has written a long treatise on the subject, but I have not considered the subject pressing enough to actually research it.
EDIT: Useful thought experiment from philosophy, devised during the time Ronald Reagan was still alive. Suppose someone told you that they would take you, erase your memories from your brain, upload Ronald Reagan's memories, and then torture the inhabitant of your body. How willing are you to say, "go ahead! You'll just be torturing Ronald Reagan, not me!"? Personally, I'm not so willing.
Peter F. Hamilton explores this in "The Reality Dysfunction".
Although it's Sci-Fi and a space-opera it's it illustrates the problem pretty well.
Then I'd quite rightly get thrown out of the thought experiment for involving the Golden Rule without a licence.
The question is whether, before the fact, you would go into minor surgery without anesthetic at all knowing perfectly well that you would forget all of the pain afterwards. Maybe you would if it was the best option, but I would wince in anticipation.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r5/the_quantum_physics_sequence/
It's long and hard to understand, but easier to understand than other explanations of quantum physics.
You can skip right to the answer, though you may not accept it without having understood the background.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/qx/timeless_identity/
>If you can see the moments of now braided into time, the causal dependencies of future states on past states, the high-level pattern of synapses and the internal narrative as a computation within it - if you can viscerally dispel the classical hallucination of a little billiard ball that is you, and see your nows strung out in the river that never flows - then you can see that signing up for cryonics, being vitrified in liquid nitrogen when you die, and having your brain nanotechnologically reconstructed fifty years later, is actually less of a change than going to sleep, dreaming, and forgetting your dreams when you wake up.
One approach is to say "it doesn't matter" because self-awareness is illusory. It doesn't exist in the same sense as matter or fields. What does exist in your mind is memory of all state transitions ever happened in your brain. It's like a linked list going back, where each element is a state of the brain. That chain is mistaken for something that exists, whereas it's just a logically linked list of some data. You are nothing but information.
That said, I have not read much about the subject, and I'd really enjoy some serious text about this theory.
Doesn't it actually (within any closed system) do that exact opposite of that, by the second law of thermodynamics?
Do we have to earn the right to be condescending nowadays?
If you ask me, condescension should be the default posture to adopt towards anyone making wild, overconfident assertions based on flimsy evidence. Now, since evidence about the future is awfully hard to come by...
To me that's kind of like asking do you have to climb the stairs in order to look down from the balcony, so, yeah, I think it needs to be earned, and I think you have earned it if you've already done the work necessary to determine that a conjecture is wild and based on flimsy evidence. The author of the article didn't do that work. I won't be seduced into conjecture about the ellipsis, but evidence about the future is not so much hard to find (it's everywhere in fact; it's the present state of things) as hard to interpret. Still, there are lots of smart people working on predicting one or another aspect of the future. Often they're wrong, so I share your skepticism, but skepticism is different from denial or dismissal.