View Full Version : Anyone else think Technological Singularity is a joke?
Uberjager
06-04-2011, 23:38
Basically, for those of you that don't know, there's a theory called Technological Singularity in which the future will advance so fast, that normal people can't comprehend what's going on because technology will be changing so fast, and the only way to understand what's going will be to adapt by getting cybernetic enhancements done to the brain.
There's this fruit-loop programmer named Ray Kurzweil, who asserts this idea, and basically last year computers were supposed to be in unrecognizable forms from what they were in 2005. And if you're quasi observant it's obvious that the ye olde atx form factor is alive and kicking. And in 2040, humans will have cybernetic organs, nano-transforming bodies, and we will have computers in our brains.
Just think of how absurd this is, if you were to take a well educated man from 20th century America and put him in Denver, he would adapt damn fast. Now imagine us 30 years in the future, will we be unable to adapt because technology will be way too advanced?
DeusExMachina
06-04-2011, 23:56
You have a gross misunderstanding of what the Singularity is, as a concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
In summation, it is a point in which technology becomes so advanced that it rapidly perpetuates itself until it is beyond comprehension. Basically, a computer becomes so smart it invents new technologies, which invents new technologies, etc and this compounds to the point where advances become unpredictable (meaning, we cannot predict the outcome).
There are many, many theories of what this outcome could be but they are just guesses. My guess is either complete artificial takeover or final evolution of man (which could be the exact same thing).
Uberjager
06-05-2011, 00:33
You have a gross misunderstanding of what the Singularity is, as a concept.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
In summation, it is a point in which technology becomes so advanced that it rapidly perpetuates itself until it is beyond comprehension. Basically, a computer becomes so smart it invents new technologies, which invents new technologies, etc and this compounds to the point where advances become unpredictable (meaning, we cannot predict the outcome).
There are many, many theories of what this outcome could be but they are just guesses. My guess is either complete artificial takeover or final evolution of man (which could be the exact same thing).
I reiterated my statement slightly, but I don't have a gross misunderstanding of it.
It's just something made up so they can run the same old show about how in the future, robots will ruin everything. They've been doing it for like 60 years now.
Place marker/
Had an awesome response written up with H.G. Wells involved etc. Realized you guys where talking robots not aliens.
Have not slept since Thursday morning will give approprite response in the AM.
mcantar18c
06-05-2011, 02:48
Place marker/
Had an awesome response written up with H.G. Wells involved etc. Realized you guys where talking robots not aliens.
Have not slept since Thursday morning will give approprite response in the AM.
http://www.collegebound.net/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Charlie-Sheen-Winning-Poster.jpg
BPTactical
06-05-2011, 09:04
Coming soon-Terminator
SideShow Bob
06-05-2011, 10:07
Resistance is futile, you will be assimilated...
The core of the Singularity concept is really looking at what happens in the elbow of an exponential graph.
I think Kurzweil is overly optimistic in his timeframe, but the concept has some merit.
http://www.ted.com/talks/ray_kurzweil_on_how_technology_will_transform_us.h tml
This video is from 2005.
This guy is a bit odd, no doubt. He has an employee who's job is to manage all the pills he takes, trying to extend his lifespan past the "singularity", which he expects will happen circa 2040.
We continue to see new ways that computers feed back on themselves. For example, it wouldn't be possible to make current computer chips without using previous computer chips.
Genetic Algorithms can be applied to any design that can be modeled. For example, a computer can model the radiation pattern from an arbitrary antenna design. A GA can then take an antenna design, randomly modify it, and model that -- take the results from that modeling to randomly make other adjustments and test them, iterating over the loop. It's evolution for your product design, done by a computer and randomness. NASA used this technique to develop very small all-axis high gain antenna for some microsats recently.
The ATX form factor is alive and well, but physical package standards have long life spans. We have flipped machines so the power supplies are at the bottom. We routinely have double-width video cards, even two video cards bonded with SLI/Xfire. GPU's can crunch math like nobodies business anymore. SATA pushing 6Bps, USB 3, DVI-D, HDMI, everywhere you look the technology is getting faster, better, easier, and cheaper. I just build a machine for $500 that is an order of magnitude faster than my $4500 machine from five years ago.
So like I said, Kurzweil is ambitious on his timeline, and over-reaching on some stuff (bio-informatics is slower than he thinks) -- but I think we will get to where the rate-of-change is almost incomprehensible. The social aspect of technology has gotten very interesting, from 20 years ago with very few people using computers or networks, to today where everyones parents are on Facebook.
It's all about Δv.
H.
I think it is an easy concept to get actually. There is already tech out there that most people don't understand, some kinda know what it's about, and few actually know how it works. You build new technology on top of that technology and your margins of understanding go down, keep doing that again and again and again. There is already so much new tech out there that is just amazing when you learn about it, and a lot of it is old stuff. This is already taking place, it's just in small quantities and no one pays attention to it, or knows it's out there. I'm not saying it is going to happen any time soon on some vast scale like stated originally, but, eventually I see something along those lines happening.
sneakerd
06-05-2011, 15:05
Sideshow Bob took my line. "Incorrect strategy- Number One"
kurzweil is a nutjob.
he's trying to stay alive to reach the point where human consciousness can be transferred into computers, thus achieving immortality.
his theory has merits, but his timeline is off and he's gonna die a sad panda before his dream is realized.
my opinion.... in the future that's coming a man that can make fire without matches, find, kill, skin an prepare game to eat, and hit a target at 500 yards with a rifle will be worth 58.25 uber geeks like kurzweil.
mcantar18c
06-05-2011, 16:46
my opinion.... in the future that's coming a man that can make fire without matches, find, kill, skin an prepare game to eat, and hit a target at 500 yards with a rifle will be worth 58.25 uber geeks like kurzweil.
+10
Pancho Villa
06-05-2011, 20:13
I think the biggest issue I have with the singularity is that it assumes that progress is automatic.
History shows that progress is far from automatic as it is full of dark ages where civilizations crumbled and people lived in the shadow of the ruins in poverty just a few generations later.
The Industrial revolution changed that - but the industrial revolution was based on the ideas that came before it (guys, there's a reason the US was founded during the Age of Enlightenment which was preceded by the Age of Reason.) I think we're getting to the point where the ideas on which consistent progress is based are finally fading from the public consciousness.
Progress has already slowed, comparatively - when you look at the poverty-stricken living standards that the Industrial Revolution eradicated and the population explosion that followed. Leftists never put the living conditions of the industrial revolution is context - like the context that half or more the people you see in the slums would have been dead from starvation, not just living in crowded conditions, 50 years before.
jerrymrc
06-05-2011, 20:57
One good EMP strike would send that boy back to first grade. [Coffee]
One good EMP strike would send that boy back to first grade. [Coffee]
or the puzzle factory [Tooth]
mcantar18c
06-05-2011, 21:33
One good EMP strike would send that boy back to first grade. [Coffee]
Ya know, I'm not hoping for a total breakdown of infrastructure like that or anything, but I think the country would benefit from a major kick in the pants.
Pancho Villa
06-05-2011, 21:42
Ya know, I'm not hoping for a total breakdown of infrastructure like that or anything, but I think the country would benefit from a major kick in the pants.
I believe:
1. Such a kick is coming, in the next 10 years.
2. Everyone who has ever fantasized about SHTF or other stuff is going to look back and wonder WTF they were thinking.
I believe:
1. Such a kick is coming, in the next 10 years.
2. Everyone who has ever fantasized about SHTF or other stuff is going to look back and wonder WTF they were thinking.
Are you trying to say that starving to death isn't as fun as it sounds?
There are some technology(ies) out there that general public/consumers don't know about.
The public/consumer demand has to meet the supply of future mass production for the technology companies to produce those prototypes.
KevDen2005
06-06-2011, 06:16
I think it's possible. Then, after a major world wide nuclear strike, machines will fight and wipe out the remaining humans. Hopefully there will be a man that can lead everyone and fight these machines...my fear at this point will be time travel...
Byte Stryke
06-06-2011, 07:26
Computer chip implants?
insanity I say!
or is it?
Saw a story where they are using small implants in certain parts of the brain to control things like epilepsy and other disorders.
My Father's pacemaker uses a computer interface and can be controlled remotely.
I thought about saying what kind of stuff they already put into people, but I didn't earlier. They have quite a bit of stuff ready to stick into us from artificial eye implants, hearts (which don't last longer than 18 months currently), limbs which we all know about, brain "pacemakers" which are used to stimulate the brain, and soon to come are nice new man built lungs. None of the devices make us any smarter, but eventually I see them being able to tap into that realm also. Now as far as not being able to understand how technology works, that is already happening. Hell, there are some people on this forum who don't understand how their AR's work yet alone a state of the art computer system or something like that.
Pancho Villa
06-06-2011, 13:18
If the govt doesn't crater civilization first, we are really on the cusp of some incredibly neat things.
All that "robots take over" stuff is nonsense, because by the time we have robots that can think you'll have people who can compute like a computer. It'll just be the next new thing for all the old codgers to say is the debil.
It'll also be totally awesome, if we get there.
I think the biggest issue I have with the singularity is that it assumes that progress is automatic.
LOL, I just thought of that old saying: "If the opposite of Pro is Con, then wouldn't the opposite of progress be congress?" [Coffee]
With technology the way it is right now, in 2011, it feels like we have kinda hit the brakes a bit. From 1890-1950 technology was changing so fast like a runaway train, then the space race and arms race and tech went leagues beyond what we could possibly imagine. Then all of a sudden, in the 80's it seems like everything except computers just stopped. We've been traveling to the heavens in planes that were designed in the 70's, flying into space on a vehicle that was designed in the late 70's, and the internal combustion engine has gone relatively unchanged for 30+ years. Science Fiction to Science Fact hasn't moved ahead as fast as it was estimated. Hell in 1985 they thought today we'd all have flying cars, cybernetic limbs and implants, colonies on the moon, people exploring mars, and weapons advanced beyond projectiles. In that place, what do we have? Pretty much the same crap from 1985 except in newer, smaller, slightly more advanced form. I want my phaser, flying car, insta-meals, and head-implanted cellphone!
If the govt doesn't crater civilization first, we are really on the cusp of some incredibly neat things.
All that "robots take over" stuff is nonsense, because by the time we have robots that can think you'll have people who can compute like a computer. It'll just be the next new thing for all the old codgers to say is the debil.
It'll also be totally awesome, if we get there.
There are already incredibly neat things already. None of it gets any big press though so not many people know about it. As far as robots taking over.... I think the movie I-Robot is the closest thing to what could happen in the near future, non intelligent (other than the main computer) machines working on basic programming against humanity. We have robots that can stand, run, do cartwheels, and hold and manipulate objects with their hands. All they need is the programming to do their job... So, how impossible is something like that? Oh, and we do have computers that think and reason already also being used in the science field. It just depends on what extent of "thinking" you are talking about. There are robots that do research on their own and have made scientific discoveries on their own without human help. There are robots that as a lot of people know, fight eachother, some with and some without human control. They go about trying to destroy eachother without randomly going nuts and trying to destroy the arena wall in which they are put in. In the end, it all depends on who has the tech, and what they would do with it.
Some new tech I read about recently was a 19 gigabyte camera (off subject of killer robots, I know...).
Pancho Villa
06-06-2011, 13:57
Human consciousness is way more complicated than just a computer, though.
To have a computer have the capacity to learn in the same ways a human does is the holy grail of computer science, and we're still a long ways from that. We can program them to analyze pictures, identify friends and foes, etc., but as yet we don't have a robot that can learn like a human can.
Human consciousness is way more complicated than just a computer, though.
To have a computer have the capacity to learn in the same ways a human does is the holy grail of computer science, and we're still a long ways from that. We can program them to analyze pictures, identify friends and foes, etc., but as yet we don't have a robot that can learn like a human can.
What about those web bots I keep hearing about? How they mine the internet for data and try to figure stuff out... they don't learn like us, yet, but they can develop their own formulas to predict different trends like stock market, housing market, etc. I know they were programmed to do what they do, but they also learn and adapt from the data they go through.
Pancho Villa
06-06-2011, 14:14
We have adaptive programs that can change how they operate based on a strict set of rules, but I don't think they "learn" in the same way we do. You'd have to write a different set of learning codes to cover every possible situation for the robot, and if it ever encountered something not coded for it would just take a shit and not know what to do. Overly complicated and VERY fragile.
Those adaptive programs are neat; a friend who was a day trader used one to automatically predict trends as stock prices went up/down. Had some pretty phenomenal returns for a while, and then equally bad losses.
Human consciousness is way more complicated than just a computer, though.
To have a computer have the capacity to learn in the same ways a human does is the holy grail of computer science, and we're still a long ways from that. We can program them to analyze pictures, identify friends and foes, etc., but as yet we don't have a robot that can learn like a human can.
I never said anything about human consciousness or a computer being able to think exactly like a human. What do you mean by learn exactly? There are computers that can read text, store it, and use the information in the text later on. There are computers that do experiments, formulate theories and learn from them also. So it all depends on what you mean by learn... Is a computer ever going to be like a human? Who knows, but pancho, there is a lot of tech out there that you apparently don't know about. Like I stated earlier, not many people do.
We have adaptive programs that can change how they operate based on a strict set of rules, but I don't think they "learn" in the same way we do. You'd have to write a different set of learning codes to cover every possible situation for the robot, and if it ever encountered something not coded for it would just take a shit and not know what to do. Overly complicated and VERY fragile.
Those adaptive programs are neat; a friend who was a day trader used one to automatically predict trends as stock prices went up/down. Had some pretty phenomenal returns for a while, and then equally bad losses.
Like I said, there are robots already that carry out experiments, reason about the results, and plan the next experiment without the help of humans.
Here pancho, one that is learning in a social setting.
http://www.csail.mit.edu/~lijin/mertzprof.jpg
MERTZ is an active vision head robot, designed for exploring scalable learning in a social context. Inspired by how human infants learn by observing and imitating other people, we plan to have MERTZ be placed in a public venue for long periods of time, continuously interacting with people and incrementally learning about various correlations. For example, the robot may learn to correlate objects and people with frequently uttered phoneme sequences, differentiate among people and their interaction habits, learn to dislike some people who tend to annoy the robot, etc. MERTZ has recently gone through a series of experiment where it interacted with many people at different public spaces in the Stata Center.
I posted an article here, or maybe it was someone else, about the robots hooked up to the Skyney type thing. Where people taught one robot how to do a task, the robot uploaded what it learned to the Skynet, then another robot down loaded that information, and performed the same task all by itself, without ever having been taught that by people.
Spyder, quit being so vague. What technologies are you talking about? I like reading about graphene.
the technology available right now is amazing.
it is released in measured doses to the public to prevent chaos.
jerrymrc
06-06-2011, 20:43
the technology available right now is amazing.
it is released in measured doses to the public to prevent chaos.
I do not believe that for a second. Many company's are releasing all they can to stay one step ahead and to get the consumer to buy.
Any giant leap in current tech that had been proven in a lab and real world would position a company to corner the market and make trillions. Are they going to sit on it while the others figure it out? no.
Just a thought.[Coffee]
I posted an article here, or maybe it was someone else, about the robots hooked up to the Skyney type thing. Where people taught one robot how to do a task, the robot uploaded what it learned to the Skynet, then another robot down loaded that information, and performed the same task all by itself, without ever having been taught that by people.
Spyder, quit being so vague. What technologies are you talking about? I like reading about graphene.
I read an article on something like that also where the robots could dock up and learn from eachothers experiences over the net. Also, I read about one today that a company is getting ready to push for household use that will go online to learn something that it doesn't understand about what you tell it.
I do not believe that for a second. Many company's are releasing all they can to stay one step ahead and to get the consumer to buy.
Any giant leap in current tech that had been proven in a lab and real world would position a company to corner the market and make trillions. Are they going to sit on it while the others figure it out? no.
Just a thought.[Coffee]
There are lots of companies that have amazing tech out already in use that we don't know about because the media attention isn't there. I think most companies will show off their finished products, but some are willing to keep it secure till it is completely done and a ready product to sell. As far as what any random government and what they have behind closed doors is concerned is a completely different story.
Uberjager
06-07-2011, 20:06
My biggest gripe with Kurzweil's idea is that he is applying the principles of Moore's law, which states that approximately every two years the number of transistors that can be put in a specified area doubles, universally. Let's take a look at suits, are suits similar in fabrication to the way they were 75 years ago? They're almost the f$%^ing same! If suit and textile technology were experiencing exponential growth, then you would think that by now, everyone would be able to afford suits made from Super 220's Merino wool. There are countless other industries that have peaked.
And gee, guess what? Moore's law will go bust probably within a 100 years. You can't make transistors smaller than atoms.
Well maybe not smaller than one atom, but how about seven atoms?
http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/smallmiracle.jpg Enlarge (http://cdn.physorg.com/newman/gfx/news/hires/smallmiracle.jpg)
An image of the template of the quantum dot device showing a central hole where seven phosphorus atoms are incorporated. Running diagonally from top left to bottom right are the two electronic leads to connect to the dot.
(PhysOrg.com) -- Scientists have literally taken a leap into a new era of computing power by making the world's smallest precision-built transistor - a "quantum dot" of just seven atoms in a single silicon crystal. Despite its incredibly tiny size - a mere four billionths of a metre long - the quantum dot is a functioning electronic device, the world's first created deliberately by placing individual atoms.
http://www.physorg.com/news193896845.html
KevDen2005
06-07-2011, 23:20
I personally think Skynet and Cyberdine systems both are way out of control...
I will say this about technology. When I was in SF Support we had server systems that was literally some of the oldest equipment this unit had. Years and years old. It was just hitting the civilian market as the next big computer thing for speed and connectivity.
The unit I was in was using secured internet and high speed internet when the civilian world thought a 33.6 modem was the best and it couldn't get better.
Quantum computing. Actual hardware is shipping now. This stuff is akin to what was possible with early computers, limited in what it can do. It's exactly the kind of thing that, if it can ride another Moore's law of expoential growth, will lead to crazy changes in the future.
For one thing, it's very likely that quantum computing will be able to break all previous forms of encryption. Quantum crypto will be a big deal in the near future as well.
H.
And gee, guess what? Moore's law will go bust probably within a 100 years. You can't make transistors smaller than atoms.
Funny enough, I just watched something earler today on the tube about transistors and what they are doing with them now. They called them transistor nano tubes I think. Anyway, now they are stacking the 4 atom small transistors on top of eachother to get more room out of them. Oh and it had this stuff called graphine jn the episode too. One atom thick and it had a better current flow than anything on the market today. The two guys who "discovered" the one atom thick graphite layer won the nobel prize last year I believe.
Funny enough, I just watched something earler today on the tube about transistors and what they are doing with them now. They called them transistor nano tubes I think. Anyway, now they are stacking the 4 atom small transistors on top of eachother to get more room out of them. Oh and it had this stuff called graphine jn the episode too. One atom thick and it had a better current flow than anything on the market today. The two guys who "discovered" the one atom thick graphite layer won the nobel prize last year I believe.
You can make your own graphene with paper, a #2 pencil, and scotch tape. Crazy.
H.
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