Hacker News Reader

Comment by orangecat | Hacker News Reader

The singularity reeks of religious concepts.

If by that you mean that scientists are attempting to achieve what religions have been falsely promising, then ok, but so what? Before we had medicine, people could only pray to try to heal the sick. Then physicians actually started studying the body and figuring out how to cure disease, fortunately not abandoning the idea because religions had failed to deliver.

He literally thinks he's going to be able to live forever (and the technology to do so will be available within his own lifetime).

An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics (ignoring the heat death of the universe for the moment). I'll take that optimism over the much more common attitude that accepts the destruction of billions of sentient beings as inevitable and often even desirable.

View on HN

I think it's pretty obvious, but let me quote Neal Stephenson:

>I can never get past the structural similarities between the singularity prediction and the apocalypse of St. John the Divine. This is not the place to parse it out, but the key thing they have in common is the idea of a rapture, in which some chosen humans will be taken up and made one with the infinite while others will be left behind.

Poll Americans (most of whom are Christian). Close to half will tell you the end of the world and thus the rapture is going to happen in their own lifetime. Christians have been believing that the rapture was around the corner for literally the last 2000 years. Arrogant if you ask me.

It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality. He'll be around 97 at the time he's predicting the singularity will occur.

So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike. Sure, Kurzweil will show you a bunch of exponential graphs to make it all seem so reasonable, but that's why Kapor says "creationsim for the IQ 140 people."

That's not optimism. It's wishful thinking. If you can't see that it has all the fundamentals of a religion, I'm not sure what else to say.

>An ambitious and unlikely goal, but it's not prohibited by the laws of physics

As far as I know, neither is God.

An interesting set of questions to follow up this fair hypothesis are:

Is it better or worse than existing religions? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Is it better or worse than no religion? In what way? Societally? Individually? Scientifically?

Religion is arrogant, for sure. And it all started when some of our very distant ancestors decided to bury their dead instead of leaving them in a pile of trash. Which, interestingly, is considered one of the defining points where we became "humans" rather than just intelligent monkeys.

Good questions, but hard to answer of course. I'd say the singularity is better if it encourages people to go into science as a result and try to make it happen. Much like how science fiction sometimes inspires technology.

Is that happening? I don't know. I'm worried that people are so confident that the singularity is not only inevitable, but just around the corner, that they're simply buckling up for the ride.

I would say that it doesn't matter much; we only have to live with the consequences of the belief for a few decades.... but then again failed predictions don't often discourage those who believed.

> I'm worried that people are so confident that the singularity is not only inevitable, but just around the corner, that they're simply buckling up for the ride.

That's a valid concern. But the nice thing here is that people don't only have to wait for it (like I guess many do), but they can actually work to speed it up.

> It wouldn't be so bad if Kurzweil's dates didn't line up conveniently with his own mortality.

His age had probably little influence on his predictions. The Maes-Garreau law, as fun as it sounds, is probably not true[1]

> So combine that with the concept of a) eternal life, b) meeting your relatives in heaven (Kurzweil is planning to resurrect his dead father), and c) AI and post humans that are essentially godlike.

I'm personally skeptical of b), except for frozen people (cryonics). If entropy wiped out the information, there's no way to resurrect someone. a) and c) however seem to be merely obvious consequences of Friendly AI (I assume immortality and wicked IQ are good things). And intelligence explosion is quite plausible. You're a bit quick to dismiss those ideas just because they happen to pattern-match religion. (Now, I agree more with this[2] than with the specifics of Kurzweil ideas.)

> As far as I know, neither is God.

Current physics are reductionist. A supernatural God wouldn't fit into that. Current physics are deterministic (modulo the many-world lingering controversy), and universal. Miracles, as direct violations of the laws of physics, wouldn't fit into that. A Lord Outside the Matrix, maybe, but that's a different beast.

[1]: http://lesswrong.com/lw/e36/ai_timeline_predictions_are_we_g... [2]: http://intelligenceexplosion.com/primer.html

> That's not optimism. It's wishful thinking. If you can't see that it has all the fundamentals of a religion, I'm not sure what else to say.

Fundamentals of religion are irrelevant. The difference between singularity and rapture is that the first one - if we'll reach it - will be of human creation. Of our science and technology, not of supermagical powers. We can pretty much see the steps there, even though we haven't executed them all. Maybe it will take 200 years, not 50, but we will get there (unless we blow ourselves up before that).

Highlighting similarities between religion and singularity has no more merit than saying that addition is bad because Hitler and Stalin did it.

> We can pretty much see the steps there, even though we haven't executed them all. Maybe it will take 200 years, not 50, but we will get there

Yes, and the second coming will happen real soon now, where the faithful will be rewarded. We can pretty much see the steps there...

> Poll Americans (most of whom are Christian). Close to half will tell you the end of the world and thus the rapture is going to happen in their own lifetime. Christians have been believing that the rapture was around the corner for literally the last 2000 years. Arrogant if you ask me.

A bit of theological nitpicking: the notion of a pre-millenial 'Rapture' is a late development in Protestant theology that appears first in the 1600s and doesn't achieve mainstream popularity until the late 20th Century. Prior to that, Christian eschatalogical expectations were for the return of Christ to establish a just government once and for all.

Your larger point is still valid, but the application of the notion of a 'Rapture' is mostly anachronistic in any context other than the last hundred years.

I guess I was grouping the second coming in there too. Good point.

If Kurzweil's technological miracle predictions come true, one of the side-benefits will be that we can start talking about them in phlegmatic, everyday language, and forget that there used to be religious undertones to it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com