* Knocks Vinge as having "lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas" – as if he'd tried, and failed, instead of just been a successful professor & award-winning SF author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge)
* Sneers at Kurzweil as if he's one-act Singularity huckster – when in fact his notoriety stems from a long, successful career as a inventor/technologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil). The exponentialism is an important part of his later writing & speaking, and perhaps a motivating/unifying theme for his other work and overall optimism, but hardly the whole Kurzweil.
A funny thing about Kurzweil is despite the far-out nature of his projections & predictions & prescriptions, in his tone and presentation, he's still really understated – a mild-mannered professor making interesting observations.
If there's even an outside chance he's right, he (or someone else) would be justified with a far more emphatic, 'evangelical', alarm-raising presentation. "Big changes are coming, we'd better get ready!"
that seems to suggest someone else other than us is creating thise changes and they are going to catch us unawares. The rate at which change happens in technology is painstakingly slow. Each rev of a product typically takes a year. Scientific research typically takes even longer. At such a slow rate of change its hard to imagine something is going to hit us in the face before we know it. Instead, it's more likely we'll chart a slow path towards the future. Slow enough that even somehting like the singularity, if it were to happen would occur over an extended period of time which would mean it would no longer be a singularity but a far more gradual change.
For context, I have a background in neuroscience and computer science... the claims about brain modeling are particularly ferociously ignorant in an era when we don't even have the foggiest macroscopic clue about the neurobiological mechanisms that enable reasoning, and in which fundamental neuroscience hasn't evolved substantially at any level above protein expression pathways in the last 25 years. If you have a thick illusion of understanding regarding how the brain works, don't feel alone - it plagued professionals in neuroscience for the 40-50 years who felt that the big breakthrough in unifying AI, systems neuroscience, and neurobiology must be right around the corner. Every new decade just deepens how crude these original notions were, and how blatantly false our estimates of our knowledge were.
The singularity is not near. It wasn't near in 2000, it won't be near in 2100, and my guess would be that it will never be near, in the same way the end times in Revelations won't be near anytime soon.
Frankly I'm happy to have people around who care about preventing improbable catastrophes, but biological and nuclear warfare, running out of water, collision with a sufficiently destructive meteor, a freak volcanic eruption off the known charts... even for the love of god encountering hostile extraterrestrials (? why not) are higher on the likely threat list in my head.
I think the attraction lies mostly in the fact that the argument avoids the "nasty bits" of reality that make real systems hard. Epidemiology, for example, has a lot to say about preventing the spread of humanity threatening diseases. But the truth is in the gritty details, not in high flown logical deductions.
I expect the author's brief was "1000 words slagging off silicon valley".
Giving the devil his due, Kurzweil has been proved wrong on almost every single prediction he's made up to the current day--at least from my reading of his 'Singularity' book. Mostly as a consequence of the bottom falling out of Moore's Law.
But like most articles addressing the singularity thesis, the author completely fails to understand it even in the most rudimentary way. The singularity hypothesis depends on several plausible but not guaranteed steps of cause and effect; the author could have discussed anyone, and, as other commenters have mentioned, there are valid reasons to think the singularity highly unlikely. But like so many bloggers, their thought process only went as far as 'sounds weird to me personally--must be a religion!'
More generally, it's both lazy and extremely dangerous to dismiss an idea simply because it seems unusual to you. This is called the Absurdity Bias, and is fairly well demonstrated.
Just for example, there are comments in this thread saying that while some of the radical predictions of technologists are possible, there's 'also nothing to suggest humans are capable of developing it.' Sounds a lot like something Lord Byron would have said about antibiotics or powered flight a few years back.
so, I mean, what's the business model.
I agree. I think an economic singularity should be a given, based on the fact that all economic ROI is at least exponential (pe^(rt)) and has consistently performed exponentially for over 100 years.
The notion that this will mean a happiness singularity, complete freedom of choice for everyone, or even human survival are up for debate.
We can expect this to be true of other business models as well; the question is where the limits are.
Um, what? He is a successful CS professor, and beloved hard SF author. Anyone should be happy to be as successful as he is.
At any rate, the singularity is coming, wether we like it out not.
My main argument is: look at Intel Corp.
Intel is emblematic of the entire semiconductor industry. Like with how much they have struggled with the recent process nodes. And look at the industry roadmap, there are only a few nodes left for any kind of silicon lithography.
What is the tech sector going to do when there are no gains to be had with making chips cheaper and higher performance? Do you think Intel's investors are going to be OK if they say they can't make chips and better than they currently are? The stock price will crash, board members and executives will be fired, to be replaced by people promising a return to growth.
Is there a way forward for Intel? Yes, several, falling under the broad category called molecular nanotechnology, which is all about building machines with atomic scale precision. This will allow Intel to build faster chips, but will also be a revolution in other areas too. And then we can reasonable talk about things like biological immortality.
My take: Kurzweil is missing the mark to suggest unabated growth in computing or anything like a true "singularity" where a curve goes to infinity. However, I think his overall insight into exponential effects and how unintuitive they are is brilliant and basically true. All of us who have been around for a few decades can clearly see the world changing dramatically in some dimensions, and the general expectation is that it will continue to do so. Some of the developments this century will probably be quite mind bending.
Kurzweil is definitely a strong optimist, and my feeling is he's a bit too optimistic, but I suspect that he may be right in the rough sense that the technologies discovered this century will help more than they hurt.
The commentary on the religiosity of technology is an interesting one, deserving more thought.
I struggle to see how life could really be so different. I haven't read of any concrete examples of how faster computers will lead to a singularity. Wealth will change hands and economic inequality will continue to increase, but that's about it. Maybe it'll be different if research in genetics, nanotech, and energy are driven by advanced algorithms. There's still a lot we don't know about the human brain.
The reality is that moores law has petered out, but we have algorithms now (deep learning) which are optimized for parallel execution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS [2] https://aiimpacts.org/current-flops-prices/
The validity of arguments for/against the singularity are distinct from whether Kurzweil is a bullshit artist, of course.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...
The CIA has declassified documents where they suspect certain people known to them may had been Scientology agents; specifically the remote viewing psychic Pat Price who died under mysterious circumstances.
These members of this esoteric deep state worked with Pat Price at the CIA in the 1960s. [0] Thus they've held the highest security clearances for decades and several are current CIA contractors. [1]
Although it appears sinister, it's more like an optical illusion. Most of them are just scientists who have a legitimate interest in the unknown. Yet somewhere there is some grand secret with a subtle or covert force at work. Deciphering it is almost impossible though.
This techno-religion is affiliated with several former military and CIA employees. The US Government views it as a long-term, persistence kind of 'paranormal deep state' conspiracy which threatens national security. And, of course, the government considers their claims regarding remarkable secrets held by the government and exotic technology as false. (And they are false.)
One person involved in this is a Stanford professor who was recently in the NY Times discussing exotic and controversial research. His partner is the one who said (in the 1980s) that he was starting a new religion with the Scientology scientist; and ostensibly these people either have or are on the direct peripheral of "Singularity-type" radical technology.
Yet the only person affiliated with the group who actually works for the US Government is a JASON scientist. Some say he is the mastermind of it all but that's unlikely. JASON's an interesting group of elite scientists who meet once a year to work on various problems and topics for the federal government.
My point is there's interesting conspiracy-like actions happening, whether they are self-organizing and random, or some cosmic force of deception. If you think of the Stoic's idea of Amor Fati, then a first principle like 'deception is a force of nature' makes a lot of practical sense.
Resist the temptation to get angry, have faith in chaos and unlock mysteries of life.
[0] https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/pat-prices-d...
[1] https://thetanetworkersscientology.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/...
What next, the Church of Drakes Equation?
It is hard to foresee the consequences of a paradigm shift.
People creating electronics with vacuum tubes never suspected that transistors and IC would change things within a few decades.
Same with flight. Couple of years before the first flight people were flying in baloons. Couple of years later, in airliners.
So they don't understand science at all but claim to use it. Typical. Singularitarians are a new version of scientologists which are a new version of mormons which are a new version of protestants or siekhs which are a new version of ... You get the point. Different details, same dumb stupidity and desire to control, use, and take advantage of others. It's just interesting to see such groups at different stages of their development and how the wider society around them responds. Typically there seems to be more acceptance as these religions get older, which is hardly surprising given humans' proclivity towards blind tradition following even when such blind following is dangerous. Humans have a hard time being skeptical of even the dumbest ideas if they are codified in tradition and this is something that such religions rely on to become established over time. Such religions usually survive in the long term if they can make it past a generation or a few decades and establish themselves as tradition, something singularitarianism is struggling heavily with currently. Fascinating to see how illogical ideas and systems of control like these religions come about.