what's your take on the singularity hypothesis ?

So basically the singularity folks want to put their brain in a jar.

I reckon as time pass we have to "reframe" this info to a scale that is useful (ex: it is more useful to say you wanna buy a 80 gig hard drive than whatevr it's equivalent in bits is) but this got me thinking that yeah, maybe a time will come when even if augmented, the pace of the multiplicity of technological and cultural accelerating changes will become so fast that we won't be able to frame and reframe this information fast enough make sense of it: and yeah that would be the singularity point or the Spike or whatever: the exact opposite of a flatline. immediate exponential growth.
I don't see it as wank, rather as it is: a useful and interesting hypothesis. just use it to calculate how much you will pay your data processing power (pc,laptop,portable?) in 2, 5 or 10 years.

singularity studies don't have enough potent tools yet so I can't make a prediction that I could confidently propose. Humans are pretty adaptable so a singularity could happen in a distant future and it might be subtle kinda, it might happen as jarvis said:
"but tomorrow you will wake up to find that your whole life has changed.
Although nothing looks different a revolution took place"

Dan I am very interested by what you are saying, could you elaborate please?

what singularity folks want to do with their identity can't be pigeonholed like that. think big dreams and grand visions.
what you propose is just not shocking enough, sorry.

Even though it's tired tired tired, Wired's Fieldguide To Transhumanists is rather fun.

btw, I don't see myself as a transhumanist, an extropian or a singularitarian because everything they cover that I find relevant can be part of something that already have a long historical tradition: hedonism.

The sucessor technologies are coming, eg. quantum computing, but an operational quantum logic gate is a long way off, let alone systems based on quantum logic.

So in short the suposition just doesn't hold water, progress hits brick walls now and again which require inspiration to over come.

Examples of this radiate throughout history, eg steam engines were limited for 40 years before James Watt added a condensor and a dual action cylinder.

Besides graphing technologiacal progress seems like a waste of time to me.

To be fair though trying to predict the future is a pretty daft game anyway. Best to strive for Utopia using the best availible technology.

predict the future is a pretty daft game anyway
it can be of use to manage one's personal budjet :-)

Best to strive for Utopia using the best availible technology.
this could be an interesting new thread isn'it?

overseeratpyramidbuildersinc: what's your take on the singularity hypothesis ? plz to bump for Chikara day
Sent at 10:30 PM on Tuesday

me: bumnp rite now?

overseeratpyramidbuildersinc: sure

ah the singularity!

some dude in Pakistan IMed me to bump this thread so people in England could read it this morning -- sounds like we're getting closer.

The speed of societal, scientific and economic change at present is predicated upon two things: 1) vast numbers of humans (presently somewhere in the near neighborhood of seven billion), who 2) generate a very large surplus above the survival needs of the total human population.

The idea that human society will perpetually exhibit growing numbers, a greater surplus and a more complex organization, and therefore at some future date achieve something so "advanced" as to constitute a "post-humanity" is based on false premises. This hypothesis fails utterly to examine the physical mechanisms at work to create the trend it projects as endless, or to explain how these mechanisms will be sustained. It is no better than magical thinking.

The earth's systems are already showing signs of a radical breakdown under the strain of the current human population and its economic activity. This fits better with population science, and with any reasonable model of future resource availability. You can't use uranium to grow food.

Earth will be just fine without us.

http://www.culttvman.com/assets/images-SF_MOVIES-2004/scopedrone397x.jpg

xpost

True that. But it still seems sad to think of no humans anywhere.

Oh for real, I love a fair number of some humans.

It's a bunch of nerds and people with pink dreadlocks who want to be robots because they got bullied at school.

i thought it was mostly about 'spontaneous AI' ie the moment when computing power, in whatever way, gets ahead of brain power, 'intellogenesis' or some such thing.

there's some cool thinking going on under the umbrella of 'transhumanism', but it's sort of like the rapture for libertarian types as far i can tell

it seems rather insipid and blindered in 2008 to keep talking as if the rapid pace of technological change is all about progress towards a better life for everyone instead of an inevitable side effect of the profit motive and the ongoing superpower pissing contest

I for one remain pretty fucking unconvinced that people's lives are actually improved by every last doohickey reviewed on engadget or what have you

I think the "singularity" will be when technology advances to the point when anyone with $50 and a free afternoon can assemble an h-bomb.

Tombot not a fan of the marketing department? reeeeeeally?

nothing to do with marketing, just a stubborn neo-luddite

My point being few people besides marketing wonks would make those insipid arguments.

it seems rather insipid and blindered in 2008 to keep talking as if the rapid pace of technological change is all about progress towards a better life for everyone instead of an inevitable side effect of the profit motive and the ongoing superpower pissing contest

that's right that train is rolling full speed ahead and it would be quite wasteful to get it to a full stop , stir it in a more humanistic direction then get back to something like current speed, not that there are any serious contender anywhere working on doing something like that, no alt institutions or social movements etc, and the people with reasonable technoscience-focused progressive perspective ("Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All" etc) well, i think it's fair bet to say that overall they will have a little less success than the "left" have in general, about that. that said , "Copernican revolution" happens , and more frequently some humble "leapfrogging" too

I for one remain pretty fucking unconvinced that people's lives are actually improved by every last doohickey reviewed on engadget or what have you

"Leapfrogging is a theory of development in which developing countries skip inferior, less efficient, more expensive or more polluting technologies and industries and move directly to more advanced ones.

A frequent example is countries which move directly from having no telephones to having cellular phones, skipping the stage of landline telephones altogether. Another example is "ecological" leapfrogging, where countries do not repeat the mistakes of highly industrialized countries in creating an energy infrastructure based on fossil fuels, but "jump" directly into the Solar Age.[1]

An aim of leapfrogging in information technologies is to promote greater access of computer and other technologies, to those people who would normally have no way of accessing it on their own.

There are a few ways that leapfrogging can occur, some of which are accidentally (such as when the only systems around for adoption are better than legacy systems elsewhere), situationally (such as the adoption of decentralized communication for a sprawling, rural countryside), or intentionally (such as policies promoting the installation of WiFi and free computers in poor urban areas)."

odd future: wolfram kills us all

Is Kevin Drum any good on AI? A friend made me read his most recent Mother Jones piece - does he actually know what he’s talking about?

Who was this sebastien idiot

No. He’s been saying we’re all about to replaced by robots for years and years.

Xp

U mean whose sock was he

my take on the Singularity? ha ha, ha, ha ha ha ha, ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha magical thinking