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- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeJun 5th 2008
There was an interesting article in New Scientist in the last coupel of weeks about the apparent paradox that anatomically modern humans first appeared around 60,000 years ago but nothing much happened until around 10,000 BC with the Neolithic revolution.
That's roughly 48,000 years,almost 10 times the entire duration of human civilisation.
So what were our ancestors doing with their newly evolved neocortexes and descended larynxes?
The current theory is that in effect they were developing the software to go with their new hardware.
For example, while animals learn by imitating their elders; it appears that only humans deliberately teach.
I think the pace of cultural evolution is much faster now - if only because there are far more of use - but I think we're msot likely still working out the full implications of stuff like telecommunications.
For the most part, our brains aren't hardwired. We display neural plasticity meaning our neural systems evolve and grow as we mature and adapt to the demands we put on them. (London cabbies famously display enlargement of brain areas associated with memory.)
It'll probably take at least a couple of generations of people literally growing up with cell-phones to explore all the capabilities they give us.
Brain/machine interfaces will likely be much the same - unless we start simulating human nervous systems on computers and running simulated developmental experiments. -
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CommentAuthormadmatt213
- CommentTimeJun 5th 2008
@LinstregCharles Darwin + Henry Ford = Adolf Hitler.
Quote of the day, good sir!
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Personally, plugging our brains to the net will be the literal death of mankind. Also, I'm not certain we'll ever be able to reach a mass exodus to Transhumanism. Seems to me like more of a niche, really. The world is filled with close-minded dumbasses, who I can never see going for any type of body enhancements. The only way this kind of stuff can get widespread appeal will be when the collective human race puts to bed the ideas of race, class, religion, politics and business. Can this ever happen? Not bloody likely. -
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This whole discussion reminds me of "Darwin's Radio" by Baer. That "Singularity" was triggered by the retrovirus SHEVA. Hidden in the DNA was a trigger that sparked overnight evolution. Some of the problems in the book were that there were so many people who were not infected, and they were all adults (the evolution happened in the foetus of pregnant women), that there was fear (surprise) of what the new generation would do to the old, or that the virus would be fatal to adults, etc.
I would honestly be afraid of a slow, gradual evolution or change, only because of the "ideas of race, class, religion, politics and business" that the majority of humans do hold so dear. Not sure it's the same exact thing, but I am more afraid of the collective stupidity and fear of humanity, than I am of our technological (or in the case of the book biological or evolutionary) advances. Until we do as Madmatt suggested, and slough off our bullshit, we will have the capacity to fuck things up for others and ourselves. Technology doesn't change it, it just makes it easier to do it to more people at once.
I think the best hope for some kind of "singularity" would be something telepathic. Where we are no longer restrained by language, and can communicate on levels beyond the limits of words. Kind of like Hari Seldon's Secret Foundation, or actually, Julian May's metaconcert, where enough humans got mental powers that the rest of humanity just got pulled along with them, and then there was no room for fear, because everyone saw how similar they all were. Not that I expect this kind of thing to happen, and there are many problems with this as well, but hey, if we're dreaming...
It's been a long time since I read either of those, so I may be dim in my memory of things, but they were probably the first things that popped in my head when I started reading this thread the other day. -
I'll bite.
The Singularity would have to change humanity dramatically enough that the people living before it relate to the ones coming after less easily than a caveman could relate to a Silicon Valley geek, but as quickly and soon enough for those who care live to see it. In the lifetime of humanity (about 60,000 years), that's as near to delta-t as damnit. A person living through the Singularity. They might recognize it as it happens, but mostly it will be as a series of radical changes and most likely in retrospect.
It'll be most likely our tools in turn remaking us. Of all the, um, sufficiently advanced technologies, like fountain of youth drugs, real artifical intelligence, hyperdrives, DNA tinkering and so on, I'd say the one most likely to shake humanity to its core will be AI, but the one most likely to finally change us will be the DNA thing. I'm gonna lean heavily on Bruce Sterling and Phillip K. Dick here.
(We're already to getting used to cloning, by extending our ethics to include it. As long as cloned animals or humans have the same rights as their natural-born counterparts, cloning is just an elaborate way to do what we'd otherwise do naturally but for some reason can't--in-vitro fertilization for example. There's no reason why clones can't go to church.)
So far as we know, only humans can really think, as we understand thinking. We've always considered it the only thing distinguishing us from any other life, let alone inanimate objects. The idea of nonhumans thinking frankly creeps us out. In most of our literature, we react badly and it all ends in tears.
From Galatea to the Golem, alchemists' homunculi, Frankenstein, COLOSSUS, the Twonky, HAL, replicants, and so on, our feelijngs about AI are at best mixed.
But, as with past and present technology, maturity of AI will depend on a confluence of supporting technologies, will, imagination and luck, most of which we'll see unfold.
We'll have plenty of time to get used to this, even if we're not quite the same afterwards. Moden literature reflects a more mature approach to the new reality. Rosemary learns to love her Baby, if the Thorns couldn't handle Damien. (Moral: don't adopt devil babies.). The last Replicant dies as nobly as any human. Neuromancer and Wintermute end up enriching the tapestry of the online world.
So AIs won't, by themselves, be the Singularity, but they'll redefine humanity a bit by expanding its concept. That's sssuming we don't freak out and traumatize the emerging artifical conscousness, with fatal results for humanity. If they surpass us, we want them to remember us fondly.
Fountain of youth drug? It'll most likely be a cocktail of separate medical elixirs, each the product of near-misses and a few spectacular failures. "Good enough" versions will first go to the rich or those willing to roll the dice with their health. Figure maybe mid-century before old age becomes optional. That's within a human lifetime, maybe even within mine (I'm 45).
A lot of what makes us human is knowing we'll die. Anti-aging drugs won't stop you getting run over by a bus. Consciousness backups might, but they can go wrong too. That's a big change, but immortals will still be human, at least at first.
Successfully tinkering with our own DNA to spin off different successor races that breed true internally but probably not with other races, in large enough numbers to form viable populations, not just as eccentricity or fashion; that might do it.
The last one could be a Singularity because it would question the nature of humanity, but the successors would have their own problems and not worry about it. But it nothing's presently driving this, and it probably won't happen in a current human's lifetime, but maybe within a late-21st century human's lifetime.
I obviously stole that last example from Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, because of the three examples above, handling the least radical one, the first one, requires the biggest ethical adjustment, to expand the franchise of humanity to anything that can think, however it's made.
The third example doesn't require any ethical improvement at all to bring about, and, again citing Bruce Sterling, our successors may fight dirty wars over their respective methods of extending human life, until enough of their progeny say screw it and light out for the territory.
So the Singularity will probably be biological, with no guarantees of people being any nicer than they were before.
@jayverni:
I think the last thing we want is for some humans to emerge as (relative) gods. Any organized attempt to successfully create superhumans or just find and raise emerging ones will probably go badly and result in greed or panic (cf. "The Golden Man" by Phillip K. Dick for the latter), and the progeny would react in self-defense. A drowned and deserted London might be the least worst scenario. -
Everyone I know seems to bring the moral element into this -- i.e. humans can't be trusted with posthuman power -- but I think that aspect is honestly a bit irrelevant and, again, based on the assumption that singularity = utopia. I think all core technologies are inherently amoral in the most literal sense. Will somebody try to build themselves a nano-enhanced army of racist bastards? Probably. And more to the point, no technology waits for morality to catch up with it. That's unpleasant, but it's true.
The other interesting assumption is that the singularity represents the end of humanity. I think that depends on your definition of being human. Biological humanity? Almost certainly. But that is, to me, the least interesting definition of being human. Humanity, like everything else in an entropic universe, evolves. We change, and the notion of "humanity" changes with us. After all, look at the sort of behavior that's been considered "inhuman" or "unhumane" over the past two centuries. Those definitions -- linked to our very self-image of what constitutes being human -- have changed radically in that time. -
@happymrlocust
You said:I don't think the Turing test matters. If I'm understanding the criteria... so what if a machine can speak and convince you they're human for a certain amount of time? That doesn't mean they're capable of abstract thought, which I personally believe is the real hallmark of intelligence.
I'd like to refer you to a wonderful podcast from VS Ramachandran on Synesthesia and the Universal Principles of Art. VS is one of the world's most bad-ass neurodudes, and a singularity refuter by the by.
I'll make a broad conclusion on what he says: abstract thought uses the same mechanisms as synesthesia, and together they help explain how metaphors are not just useful to humans, but also vital for complex thought. And they're a complete accident, too. If you can program the same mechanism into a computer that evolution hacked into synesthetes (he doesn't think you can), you've got a computer that can think about dignity and poetry.
God is a hacker, not an engineer. -
@jzellis...kind of off topic, but I had questions about this.
<em>So is it really all that unreasonable to think that within a century we might be able to link the parts of our brain that handle memory directly into a network? To store our memories -- in some form -- externally? Or, more interestingly, to access the collective storehouse of memory that the Internet is increasingly becoming?</em>
I'm not sure exactly how that device you mentioned works as far as mimicking the hippocampus. Is it biological, working with chemical storage of information, or is it somehow transferring electronically stored info to the brain?
My only hesitation in saying we will have electronic memory banks for our brains any time soon is the problem of encoding information in a way that our brains could instantly use it, like a memory. When you read a book on a subject, or watch a film or whatever, the brain stores that experience as chemical packets of data. There is also a lot of evidence that the brain of one person uses very different "filing systems" than the brain of the person next to them, which could make transfer of data difficult...the chemical signals for "That dog just peed on my shoe." could have a slightly different composition in two different brains and end up meaning "This mug is full of delicious lemon aid." when passed along. Very simplistic example, sorry, but I think it fits.
I feel that even teaching an electronic system to decipher that mess once could be a real challenge. But then getting it to reinterpret that data to make sense to someone else's mind, and progressing to a network of information useful to ANYONE'S brain, seems near impossible.
And I see that vrbtm just posted something above as I was writing this that almost says the same thing. So this post could be useless now. Heh.
=V= -
would machines be 'evil' of they took over? The AI self-awareness thing is always viewed/portrayed as bad, but maybe Humans are the bad guys in this scenario (track record, handling the planet and so on), and you couldn't really pre-judge the motivations of some artifically-created life, mainly as we're too biased....
as for The Sing, I don't know if it would necessarily be an inevitability, I think we're all due for a drastic shift - like the fall of major civilizations of the past - and we'll revert to pre-tech ways of living, or make way for some new age/empire... -
I have been getting used to the singularity ideas since discussing them in the late 1970s with Eric Drexler.
There is little point in building AIs that are not as smart as we are. Building them that are smarter than we are marks the end of humans being the prime movers of history. I think we will be at the cusp of the singularity when scientific papers start to have AI co authors.
There is little doubt we can build AIs. If humans are considered intelligent, then we are a natural example just as birds were a natural example of heavier then air flight being possible. We may not need to understanding how human minds work to build AIs, but a detailed enough simulation of a brain would be expected to exhibit intelligence.
I have become apprehensive about blind uploading as a way to AI. The problem is that humans seem to have conditionally activated psychological traits of which capture-bonding (behind Stockholm syndrome) and conditionally adjustable gain for xenophobic memes (leading to wars) are two. How many others there are is unknown as are the conditions that activate them and the consequences of doing so.
Even if we understand the basis for "safe" AI personalities the results could be tragic--though they might not be recognized as such.
I have mentioned this before. It's applicable to this discussion.
http://www.terasemjournals.org/GN0202/henson.html
Keith Henson
PS. In some areas, humans can't get along without computers today. It's been 20 computer generations since humans were able to lay out a computer chip without using computers. The last one (I think) was the 8080. -
- CommentAuthorKosmopolit
- CommentTimeJun 5th 2008
"Everyone I know seems to bring the moral element into this -- i.e. humans can't be trusted with posthuman power -- "
Compared with how our species have lived for most of its time on Earth a box of matches and the ability to count past 10 constitute transhuman power. -
We can't even get a cell phone that's "smart" and has all the goodies on it NOW and lasts more than 2 1/2 hours. Now, sure, things are changing and stuff's "advancing", but I won't be witnessing any of it in my lifetime unfortunately. Nothing of any note. I dream of a robot goddess I can fuck, but she won't be affordable to me in my lifetime unfortunately. I can only write a book about it, but even that is a fricken nightmare. It's already been done and what am I to do with the rest of my time?
Sing-u-larities: No ubiquitous devices affordable that hook you up to the net with power and bandwidth. No. It doesn't exist. And I generally don't think it'll happen in the twinkling of an eye. It's like most every thing else: "PROTRACTED", with strings attached.
Why would the powers that be allow any one that much freedom and true knowledge? I really don't consider our minds bodies souls growing much. We still forget where our things are and can't remember anniversaries or whatever we were just saying a moment ago and what all point we were trying to make in this.
Ray's book (The Singularity's Near) is interesting, but 2045 is beyond me. I won't be here for it. I personally don't consider it'll be any thing...a friendly pro-scientific "apocalypse" where all is known/forgiven and everyone "HAPPY". No. Won't happen. Not on my watch. Sorry. Too bad. I would love to have peace and rid the world completely of stupidities. Am totally sold on the idea of a smart phone with camera, 20 hours operations, internet, 6.8 megapixel camera, music player (w/giant library), all of that, for 400.00 clams....no more!! All the rest of that....and the fembot, and an ability to read and write and not have to otherwise "work" for a living....living wherever I want, traveling when/where/however...but, I just don't consider it'll gel with my consciousness, (replicated/real/imagined), experiencing it "first hand". Just don't consider it'll happen. -
'the singularity' will be the generation born after longevity treatments, when natural lifespans indefinately longer than current become normal, commonplace, expected, and unremarkable.
the first generation taking the treatments or cure or whatnot will still have reference points of having spent part of their lives expecting to grow old, have their bodies slowly fail, and eventually, inevitably, die.
the generation born into longevity will not. they will grow up, they will stop aging at some point probably in their 20s, and barring disease, war, violence, or accidents, they will simply stay that way. indefinately.
this will be the mental state that changes things. more than having twitter and google in your cortex, more than being able to take on the form of a panther or a vacuum-ready jellyfish or a nanite cloud or whatever, more than any kind of biomodification or techno-augmentation or uploading or other transformative process.
it is the mental state of growing up and never having the realization that You Are Going To Die. growing up into the knowledge that you might die, but not necessarily.
we can try to write about it, but we'll never know what it's like. even if the immortality treatment came out tomorrow, free to all, we'd still be stuck in the first generation who knew we were going to die, and then didn't.
(dear cyborgs in ghost in the shell and derivative works: you are not humans, you are cyborgs. stop angsting about that and go enjoy doing cyborg things that we soft meatpods cannot.) -
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CommentAuthorstevewallace
- CommentTimeJun 5th 2008
I've got to agree with jzellis. I don't think the 'Singularity' will bring about Utopia...or for that matter even move us much closer. I figure it will probably come in the form of techno organic body modifications. I don't see any reason why we couldn't have additional memory, even if it's slower and clumsier than actual brain memory. We might not be able to direct link with the brain but we could probably hijack the optic nerve to feed pulsed image information into the brain. This could effectively allow for a mimic of conscious memory retrieval without a direct tech to brain translation. While still extremely complicated, it might be slightly easier.
At some point I would guess we'll be able to mimic electronically everything the brain does and subsequently be able to move our current consciousness to said device. I think Jeff Hawkins had some interesting theory on how intelligence works and how it could be translated to an electronic format in his book ON INTELLIGENCE which you can read in full on Google books. -
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@gottgen: Good questions that I don't have answers for. I remember reading a SciAm article about it a few years ago -- probably 2003-2004.
My guess is that the memory storage might vary from person to person, but the method of converting experience to memory is probably pretty standard. An analogy would be a hard drive: the way each operating system handles storing and accessing files is different, but the physical method of writing to and reading from the drive is pretty much always the same. You can build an IDE interface without having to know about FAT or HFS or whatever file system is going to be used on it.
I mean, I'm not a neuroscientist, and that's a wild-ass guess. If Vanessa pops in here, she might know more about the actual mechanics of this than I do.
Although it does seem unlikely that our storage patterns would be that seriously individualistic in the first place. While each person's memories are shaped by their own perceptions, etc. etc. the human brain logically ought to have some standardization in how it reads and writes memory. I mean, we're mass-produced, right? :-) -
- CommentAuthorRazorSmile
- CommentTimeJun 6th 2008
Every person or group interested in the idea of a singularity has given it their own definition. Vinge thinks it's either AI or IA, Kurzweil just thinks Moore's Law's been in effect since the Stone Age, Yudkowsky seems pretty fixated on AI and Stross thinks it's irreversible change. I like Stross' version the best because it's the most consistent with what we already know. Irreversible change means changes in human society at large that are so pervasive and culture-altering that removing them would result in collapse or at the very least, massive dieback. Agriculture was a singularity, spoken language was a singularity, written language was a singularity, the printing press was a singularity, computer networks are a singularity. What's next? I don't know but I do know that we'd better keep the Amish around as an experimental control. -
Stross thinks it's irreversible change.
Frederick Pohl wrote this great short about that kind of Singularity back in 1967 or so. "Day Million" is a snarky narrative story about a love affair between a metal-skinned cyborg spacer and prenatally transgendered otter woman. They bump into each other, decide they should be lovers, and never meet again after exchanging virtual reality simulations of the other. For carnal purposes. Only he denies it's about the Singularity. Tough, Fred. You NAILED it:"Dora is farther removed from you than you are from the australopithicines of five thousand centuries ago. You could not swim a second in the strong currents of her life. You don't think progress goes in a straight line, do you? Do you recognize that is is an ascending, accelerating, maybe even exponential curve? It takes hell's own time to get started, but when it goes it goes like a bomb. And you, you Scotch-drinking steak-eater in your Relaxacizer chair, you've just barely lit the primacord of the fuse"
-- Day Million -
- CommentAuthorBrent Wilcox
- CommentTimeJun 6th 2008 edited
Seems the whole concept confuses some interesting metaphors with reality. -
- CommentAuthorRazorSmile
- CommentTimeJun 7th 2008 edited
My personal definition of an actual paradigm-shattering singularity-with-a-capital-S would have to be the ability to directly and consciously access our own neurology, psyche and emotional states. As in, being able to choose your emotions at will, regardless of what your environment says. Decide to be a sociopath - and you are. Decide to be monomaniac - and you are. Decide to be utterly emotionless, switch off your sex-drive, change your sexual orientation - and you have. Decide to be extroverted, introverted, catatonic or some febrile combination of the above - and you are. No waiting, no therapy, no years-of-meditation, just flip a switch in your head, turn a dial one way or the other and that's it.
And yes, that includes love. Love is not special. Shut up. -
the human brain logically ought to have some standardization in how it reads and writes memory. I mean, we're mass-produced, right? :-)
Not necessarily. As newborn infants, a lot of our neurological pathways are still yet to be formed. And so the input from our senses shapes how those paths connect, making each brain a unique individual layout. We teach ourselves to be "software compatible" with one another, but the hardware isn't exactly off-the-shelf... -
instead define it as "the moment when technology becomes powerful and pervasive enough that it literally changes the meaning of being human",
Ok, I'm going to come at this from a completely different angle. You say it is when technology reaches a point when it changes the meaning of being human. Therefore, could you think of this in the terms of identity?
We are defined by a number of things. Our nationality, our job, etc.
We already have talk on automation and machines removing the need to employ people (what happens when it becomes cheaper/more efficient to purchase/use robots/computers than humans) and what about changes in globalisation altering our concept of nationality and government (does globalisation really see international boarders?).
I might be going off on a mad one here but...