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There won't ever be a singularity. Ever.
Xiphias 02/21/08, 15:14 | 
42 | There's only two kinds of people who believe in the possibility of a singularity: people completely removed from the scientific realm, and lunatics.
The people in the first category, I can sympathize with. You're out there and you're only real exposure to this world is Scientific American, Popular Mechanics, and the odd news article. There's basically only two kinds of articles in any of these publications: "Amazing New Something To Change Everything" and "What If This Theory".
The thing about the pop-science magazines is that they know their audience. They know you care about this stuff because it inspires a sense of wonder in you. That's their entire product: a sense of wonder. Yes, you can learn stuff from them, maybe, but not really anything substantial - and that's not their fault. How are you really going to teach people who don't have PhDs in physics about string theory in a four page article? You aren't. So you give them a few nice metaphors, make them marvel at how strange the universe is, and that's all you can really do. And that's fine.
But the problem is that this paints a very rosy picture. The magazines and articles are trying to make you feel good, and the scientists behind the articles are spinning it as best they can to get more funding. Science looks great. We're the wizards of modern life.
And then the lunatics come along. They're the ones who have a very personal investment in the whole idea of mankind's self-salvation. Maybe they're just terrified of death, maybe they have god complexes, maybe they're just clinically optimistic. Who knows.
So they churn out starry-eyed books and editorials and seminars about the rights of disembodied consciousnesses and they start selling prepaid legal services for your severed frozen head and the next thing you know we have an entire Singularity subculture. They grab clueless kids, basement dorks, would-be cultists who want all the koolaid of Jonestown but none of the Religion...
They're no different than the Reverend telling his charges that The Rapture is coming in their lifetimes. They're telling everyone to waste their entire lives preparing for a dream that just won't ever happen.
I think about all the fat kids eating this shit up - "Don't worry, one day we'll replace your asthmatic saggy-tittied walking corpse with a shiny metal body made out of intelligent polymers" when what they really need to be hearing is "kid if you play outside you'll find out the world is pretty cool, and you'll lose weight in the process."
There's going to be a generation of obese shut-ins who, at 53, two heart attacks past their first and one left to go, are still waiting for the machines to come down from Olympus and save their diabetic asses. It's such a horrible thing to tell people.
I mean, have you ever read a scholarly publication? Have you ever learned math? Have you ever tried to write a program?
They say the number of publications is skyrocketing, right? That someday the rate of publication will hit some asymptotic wall of endless knowledge?
Well, that's great. I've got copies of Machine Learning and Intelligent Agents and IEEE Computational Intelligence on my desk. Any month now I should see articles like "Towards A Truly Alive Machine That Loves You" and "Stochastic Evolution of Prosthetic Organs", right?
Well, I must not be reading the right fucking publications, because what I see is the continuation of a twenty-year old debate on how to even define 'intelligent agent', and a massive editorial on "why aren't we actually building real intelligent agents*?"
I see graduate students and professors trying to publish on anything they can, regardless of quality and impcat, just so they can get their degrees or keep their jobs. I read papers and realize that 1) I just saw someone else tackling this same problem last month and 2) neither of them have done anything, it's all just empty talk about defining the problem.
Xiphias's Top 5 reasons why the singularity is retarded.
#1 - Science and Technology are diverging, not converging. The entire idea of the singularity is that everything is coming together and one day we'll be Done. That's insane. The growing number of scientists, the growing technology industry - these things aren't coming together towards the answer to the life equation. They're branching out as everyone struggles to stake out their turf in academia and the market. Reality is so obviously not converging towards a single goal that to say "We are not converging to a singularity" is practically tautological.
#2 - No one is working on this shit. Science is not made out of Lego™ bricks you can just stick together. Inventions and software even less so. So the singularity can't just happen on its own as some 'emergent process' or whatever buzzword they've stolen from actual, real research. No one is building a singularity. No one is trying to unify all AI research with all biology research to create a nanomachine orgy in your veins that will keep you young forever. Crazy people often decide to take up the mantle of Savior (hell, I worked for one) but they never actually do anything because there's nothing to be done.
#3 - Who's paying for this crap? The answer is easy: No-one. Causing a technological singularity, if it were possible (and it's not), would be the greatest and most difficult undertaking of mankind. And not just harder, but exponentially harder. It would require the conscious and deliberate attempt to unify everything into everything else. And if everyone is working on that, they're not working on Adobe Photoshop 8 or their next grant proposal, so someone is going to have to feed them. Given that roughly every person on the planet would be required to participate in some way (who is coordinating the paperwork? Who's managing the teams? Who's ordering lunch?) someone is going to have to foot the bill. Businesses? Don't be ridiculous. No business invests in "hey let's solve everything forever." There's no profit returns on bullshit that outlandish. Governments? Governments may be corrupt, evil, and idiotic, but they're not completely fucking insane.
#4 - Old problems don't go away. Have you ever worked on a collaborative project of any kind? People can't even agree on where to order lunch, let alone how to combine all science into one big Singular Wad that you can shove up your ass. Have you ever worked on a computer project? The act of making everyone on the team even understand> what the hell they're all talking about is 80% of the work. For any project. Then writing software that doesn't break is its own unslayable beast. With all the mundane problems like "hey how do I get linux to display a text file" how the fuck are we going to create a computer brain that solves all the world's problems?
#5 - We don't know much of anything. We don't know how our brains work, let alone how to recreate them. We don't even know if we are capable of knowing. You (and by 'you' I mean 'anyone who is into this crap') want to talk about "AIs" before "AIs" exist. You might as well be talking about unicorns and dragons. This shit is completely imaginary. We can't even say "we haven't solved these problems yet" because we don't even know what we're trying to solve. Factor in our murky understanding of cellular biology, of nano-scale physics, of fucking everything and it's just absoludicrous that you think there's any sense in talking about the implications of any of this. You think we're going to solve millions of years of evolutionary adaptation and replace it with something better after a mere...what? 300 years of scientific methodology? 60 years of computing? Are you stupid?
We, as a species, don't even need a singularity. 1.2 billion people can't even read and you're worrying about whether or not putting our brains into computers is going to suck or be awesome? We don't need fucking AI, we need irrigation and schools and governments that don't fucking rape and slaughter tribal minorities. We need lifestyles and manufactoring centers that aren't going to kill all life on the planet. We don't need some computer saying BEEP BLOOP I HAVE CALCULATED THAT IT'S BAD FOR PEOPLE TO KILL EACH OTHER. Who would even fucking listen to it? What, it's going to take over all the computers? I can't even get my cellphone to take over my bluetooth headset and they were designed to work together.
So, sorry, kids. The singularity is canceled. Go home. Or better yet, go outside. If you want to save the world, go to med school and then join the peace corps. This singularity bullshit isn't science, it's science LARP.
*The answer is that we are, but everyone decided that "intelligent agents" had to mean that there's a universal framework for intelligent agents, and that the code that buys your coffee beans when you run out is the same code that runs the space shuttle. Shockingly, this concept failed to pan out.
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also (Midnight Man) 02/21/08, 16:28 |
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