When Do Post-Humans Show Up? | Hacker News Reader

When Do Post-Humans Show Up?

tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com

12 pointsdarragjm19 comments

Post-humans are showing up all the time. I intend to evolve again on July 11, when I get equipped with my connection to the hive mind... er, I mean my always-on Wikipedia appliance, courtesy of Apple.

Admittedly, it won't be that impressive. If I could somehow take my iPhone back in time (with a trans-temporal wireless network connection, of course) to play Trivial Pursuit against my high-school-aged self, then it would be obvious how different my augmented self is from my prior self. (And equally obvious that skill at Trivial Pursuit, which used to be considered akin to being smart, is now an oddball exercise, like building furniture using nothing but a jackknife, or starting a fire without matches. We don't have to pursue trivia anymore. We caught it. It's sitting here in this box.)

But, as it happens, I'm actually late to the iPhone party, and when I get one nobody will care. It is as Bruce Sterling said: "the Singularity is banal". Post-singular creatures won't be all that impressed with themselves, just as the first human to utter a grammatical sentence didn't really stop to marvel at it. She was probably too busy trying to get her friend to pass her a handful of walnuts.

That's a good point, but I think the idea of "Singulitarians" (for lack of a better term) is that your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.

Of course, if the "Singularity" happens to mean we'll just be much faster thinking version of ourselves, then perhaps you're right, it will be banal, as presumably our perception of time will be perverted as well.

your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.

What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?

In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.

Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.

If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.

A human brain simply can't keep up

Can't keep up with being an iPhone?

I have heard it described as crossing the event horizon on a sufficiently large black hole. If the hole is large enough, its possible that the gravity at the horizon would only be 1G, so you wouldn't feel anything but you would see the sky close in on itself, never to return.

FTA:

These critics obviously have not read my book and have not read this chapter because they do not respond to anything I’ve written. It is as if they’ve just heard a superficial presentation of these ideas and respond without any engagement of the extensive discussion that has already taken place about these issues.

And now we know how Kurzweil says RTFA.

Without reading TFA, I could tell that had to be a Kurzweil quote.

I don't think there's much chance that I'll live forever, and there's much less chance that Kurzweil will. But I sure hope that we both don't, because otherwise he'll never shut up about it.

It's surreal to see this even in the NYT's orbit.

I was thinking the same thing. It wasn't too long ago that the only mainstream coverage of this stuff was the occasional Kurzweil-centric fluff piece along the lines of "Hey, this crazy guy says we'll live forever soon." I wonder if the singularity debate's finally leaking into the public consciousness, or if the Spectrum special issue just forced a blip.

Well, I don't think anyone can argue that if we create an AI smarter in nearly every way than any given human, several or a large amount of those AIs could create an even smarter AI, and so forth recursively. The only question is if we indeed will, and if so when (even 100-150 years isn't that far off if you think about it). Given the huge impact it would have on society (for better or worse), it's perfectly reasonable to be a matter of public debate.

Actually that point isn't necessarily obvious to me. Maybe we can create an AI which is 10% smarter than ourselves, but maybe a 10% smarter AI still isn't smart enough to create an AI 10% smarter than itself. Maybe building a 121% AI that smart is such a hard task that even our 110% AI can't manage it -- maybe the best it can do is a 115% AI.

Analogy: Out of Lego, I could build a robot arm that's capable of building a slightly larger robot arm out of Lego. But I can't just keep on doing this 'til I have a robot arm the size of the Burj Dubai, because there are limits to how big a Lego-based robot arm can be before it collapses under its own weight.

I'm not saying that AIs are like this, just that they might be.

Your analogy is particularly apt if you consider that two of the means of achieving AI are emergent and thus not engineering and not at all friendly to reverse engineering. If we can simulate the brain's processes in bulk, we still don't necessarily understand how it does what it does. (Like making a photocopy of ciphertext.) Likewise, if we create some sort of architecture that lets us evolve AIs, there is no guarantee that we will be able to understand how the results work. There's no guarantee that the resulting AIs will be able to either.

I think Godel's Incompleteness Theorm implies the machines can't grok the code they are made from. I'm not sure though.

How do you know we'll be able to create an AI smarter in nearly every way? What if we just create an AI that's like an average human, but is able to pay attention without distraction? What we'll have are a bunch of ideal slave laborers, not a runaway exponential increase of intelligence.

Does this assume that at some point humans will have successfully mapped the entirety of the brain and its functions?

But what happens a year or two after that? The best answer to the question, “Will computers ever be as smart as humans?” is probably “Yes, but only briefly.”

what does that mean? that it then will be much smarter?

Or that the advent of ai will cause us to wipe each other out

Typically between 7 and 10 am. I hear you lucky Americans see them on Saturday, too!

Post-Humans don't want to live forever. They are capable of detatching themselves from their egos and accepting death.

This kurzweil guy is rocking the same fear of death vibe (a prehuman drive for survival) that keep most traditionally relgious people from experiencing the actual spiritual evolution that the real post humans will go through. Kurzweil is just basing his mythology to suppress the fear of death on tech and sci fi themes rather then Christian myths.

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