When will 'The Singularity' occur?
Posted by Greg at 01:52, 25 Jun 2010Within 10 years
14% (262 votes)
Within 2 decades
5% (99 votes)
Within the next 50 years
10% (183 votes)
Before the end of the 21st century
8% (142 votes)
Beyond the 21st century
10% (178 votes)
Never
53% (994 votes)
Total votes: 1858
Comments
23 February 2009
5 days 20 hours
Singularities, if one defines them as events that occur that divide understanding into "before event" and "after event", occur repeatedly, frequently, and even, depending on how particular one wishes to get, constantly.
Anyway, on the larger level of historical processes, I hold with the Spenglerian view of cyclical history, not the Singularitarian view of apocalyptic history.
30 April 2004
1 hour 20 min
In recent times, 'The Singularity' has become the term for 'The Technological Singularity':
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technologic...
Sorry to be ambiguous, the title was meant to be more obvious by the posting of today's focus article on the front page.
Kind regards,
Greg
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You monkeys only think you're running things
@DailyGrail
23 February 2009
5 days 20 hours
That's as may be. Either way, I still don't buy the idea, at least not in the sense that it will be the "end of humanity" any more than the development of multicelluar organisms represented the "end of bacteria".
Let's say, for argument, that it is possible to make a machine which is more intelligent (whatever we mean by that - and that's an important caveat) than man. It goes on to become a new level of organization with intelligent behaviors (so, an apparent advance from the current multibody organisms, such as nation-states and the like). How will this seem different from the individual human perspective? Since individual humans are still largely unaware of the extent of influence of their current social fabric on their own behavior (see, for instance, this article), I can't see how a potentially superior intelligence would even be known to exist - for all we can know, such things might already be in place!
So, even if the underlying postulate, creation of a superior intelligence in machine form, is possible in principle (which is still in question, as we have yet to really define what we mean by "intelligence" in the first place, nor even to know yet if we can develop a meaningful definition at all), there is still no evidence that it will have any effect noticeable on the level of perception at which we communicative organisms engage.
22 November 2004
5 weeks 1 day
Well, August of 2011, or thereabouts.
The coming of the IPcalypse.
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We are the cat.
12 April 2007
6 hours 3 min
I would have rather chosen "I don't know". All the projections given to this event have seemed to gone the way of our projections of the arrival of nuclear fusion —always on the horizon, just around the corner... a few more paces...
Then again, to say "never" seems as extremist as the people who are positively sure they are going to live forever :)
The fact is that true revolutions can never be predicted BEFORE they happen. They can only be interpreted after the impact.
It's not the depth of the rabbit hole that bugs me...
It's all the rabbit SH*T you stumble over on your way down!!!
Red Pill Junkie
1 May 2004
4 hours 18 min
I think its appropriate here to consider what the term "singularity" actually means (as a mathematical concept):
note that the answer is NOT clear and simple and beyond debate - the answer is basically similar and related to the term "infinity" - what does Infinity actually mean ? There are different schools of thought about infinity ...
I argue that "singularity" is basically a specific way of saying "this is a point where we do not know what is happening". More specifically: we have a function ( a developement "law" ) here that we can describe up to this point, but the point isn't covered by the description.
Or more bluntly:
"singularity" is just a very elaborate way of saying "we don't know"
my 2 cent
-- Roland
10 May 2007
1 year 24 weeks
It could happen within the next 20 years but my bet is within the next 50. Computing power is easy, but that does not equate to artificial consciousness - and THAT will be tough.
"What you perceive, your observations, feelings, interpretations, are all your truth. Your truth is important. Yet it is not The Truth." -- Linda Ellinor
18 September 2007
17 hours 10 min
If artificial intelligence is to approximate human intelligence in all its variety then some provison will have to be made for that intelligence to process feedback not just via silicon gates buy also via the noumenal through such pathways as scalar waves and other radiations to which the human nervous system also responds. The nervous system is as much antennae as it is a boxed in calculator.
This doesn't place the probability out of reach though. The ghost that has been haunting my father's weekend ranch house has a knack for turning on electronics such as the television set, the lights, and the house security system so just bare bones wiring can apparently be a conduit for more than just electrons.
9 April 2008
1 year 26 weeks
Each technological advance we make is more difficult than the previous one, just as the law of diminishing returns predicts. Hundreds of years ago, a single person (Da Vinci, Newton, Archimedes) could have a huge impact on technological progress. As time goes on, it takes more and more people/resources to advance technology. Just 100 years ago, Edison required a whole team to make advances and today entire corporations are needed to advance technology. Pretty soon corporations & governments will not be able to advance technology at the rates we're used to and the singularity will draw further and further away.
13 October 2005
1 year 26 weeks
It only takes one person to have the vision and skill to advance technology - it takes whole corporations to manufactuer, market and sell to the sheep.
FWIW there will never be a technological singularity as that would nesessitate creating artifical consciousness - its unlikely we will be able to work out the what, where, how of human consciousness let alone create it.
lucky
18 September 2007
17 hours 10 min
My vote is that the singularity has already happened. We just don't know it yet. The singularity of "information" being available to everyone for almost nothing in cost has created a new world brain, and that brain is transforming human awareness in amazing ways. We are right now living the transition to homo informis, and the surprise is that machine augmented human intelligence is the new supercomputer.
22 November 2004
5 weeks 1 day
The question is though - is this world brain any smarter than the previous world brains.
There were aggregate minds before, based on simply people writing letters. Sure the bandwidth was tiny compared to today. But the content of the letters was created and processed much more carefully.
Back then people thought about the information they communicated. That seems to have gone out of style today - mostly people are just talking, practically nobody is thinking about what they read.
And it is getting worse with more video content, instead of written articles. The content is becoming even less precise, just flashier and louder.
It could well be that this new aggregate brain is going to be very primitive, going only for base instincts, not for any kind of thinking.
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We are the cat.
18 September 2007
17 hours 10 min
Perhaps nobody is talking beacuse the human brain is still trying to digest everything pouring in. I don't think the collective mind will be overwhelmed forever, but the synthesis may take quite awhile this go'round. Periods of summation and real leaps in theory and invention tend to be few and far between and very sudden and unforeseen. Social efflorescences in thinking and new behavior are spectacular but rare. Most of the time is spent in digestion. Orgasm is periodic and relatively rare as a percentage of human time.
22 November 2004
5 weeks 1 day
Yes the time frame is another factor in this.
When a complex system shows intelligence of a certain type at one level of organization, there is no reason to assume it will show the same type of intelligence at other levels. At lower levels this is obvious - cells in the human body don't have the same intelligence as the whole human.
I propose that at higher levels the intelligence is not maintained either. A group of humans is not intelligent in the same way as a single human. And a group is not necessarily more intelligent if it is bigger.
For one thing, groups are slower than individuals just because of physical constraints.
It is also not obvious how the relative speed of the communication and individual thinking works out. Nobody really knows how a composite mind converges on something new - every facet of a new idea seems to be present for a long time, and then after decades it suddenly flourishes.
Fascinating topics in cognitive science, and we get to watch it happen. Maybe.
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We are the cat.