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Comment by bratbag | Hacker News Reader

Its infinite from the perspective of our side of the curve.

It's another application of advanced technology appearing to be magic, but imagine transitioning into it in a matter of hours, then with that advanced tech transitioning further into damn-near godhood within minutes.

Then imagine what happens in the second after that.

It may be operating within the boundaries of physics, but they would be physical rules well beyond our understanding and may even be infinite by our own limited definition of physics.

That's the curve.

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I think it's completely ridiculous how you people just casually imply that a current computer can somehow achieve "damn-near godhood".

Hardware is a bottleneck. Better hardware can't be designed, manufactured and installed in minutes.

You can't just infinitely improve software sitting on the same hardware. At some point the software is as efficient as it can possibly be. And realistically a complex piece of software won't be close to optimal.

You people love dreaming up possibilities but you never stop to actually think about the limitations. You just assume everything will work out magically and satisfy your fantasy.

I'm glad to see people like you that understand that computers are ultimately machines that we put electric current (limited by our infrastructure) in to, and even with optimal efficiency (which we are no where close to), some math comes out. This year we all learned that a lot of what we thought was human thought can be expressed as math. Cool. But we can't scale that any higher than the physical input to the computer, and the physical heat dissipation that we can handle either. A 100% occupancy computing device is effectively a radiator.

So singularity people think 2 fallacies:

1. That it is possible to write an exponential function that somehow scales to asymptotic

2. That it is possible to write software that is so energy efficient that its output somehow exceeds the power draw

1 can be redefined to say "effectively" vertical. Ok. Cool motive, not a singularity.

2 can be handled by pumping more and more power in to the machine and building new nuclear plants to do so. This is what Microsoft is doing today.

> Hardware is a bottleneck. Better hardware can't be designed, manufactured and installed in minutes.

Yes you can. The Cloud.

Even the cloud has its limits, though. It's not infinite, and it does require money.

True, but it does make hardware much more available and not a bottleneck anymore. At least not in the same way. At some point, if it hasn't been reached already, the power available with existing hardware will represent more compute than is needed to hold AI. At that point AI could start creating its own hardware production facilities as well.

Science inherently concerns itself with understanding and defining limits. However, when it comes to intelligence, there appears to be a significant gap in our grasp of these boundaries. Reflecting on my own thoughts from 35 years ago, I recall envisioning the singularity at the age of 12 or 13. Looking back, I realize that many of my conceptions from that age were either incorrect or grossly exaggerated. This realization leads me to speculate that the notion of the singularity might fall into a similar category, although concrete evidence to support this is currently lacking. While I find myself partially aligning with your points regarding magical thinking in this context, I am curious about how one might construct a robust, scientifically grounded argument in this domain.

Like the Rapture and other concepts like that. How fascinating. Within a split second, in the time it takes someone to blink and hear a trumpet's blast, everything could change. Amazing! I can't wait!

As both a Christian and an AI-educated software engineer who subscribes to neither the rapture nor the singularity, I really like this comparison. They both feel like a kind of escapist thinking that in the near future, this magical event will happen that will make everything else irrelevant.

The Singularity people and the Rapture people are both correct. Can already see the event starting to take shape, just gotta know where to look for all the signs. Everything is rapidly heading in that direction.

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