Vernor Vinge on the Singularity Monday, Mar 31 2008
singularity 3:11 pm
I disagree with Dr. Vinge on the point that a hard takeoff would necessarily be scary. If the people in the bootstrap group care about human welfare, they’d be careful not to disrupt the world too much in too short of a time, as most humans would probably find this disorienting. If a hard takeoff is necessarily objectionable to most humans, the bootstrap group could artificially stretch it into a slow takeoff.
Interview by David Orban.
Thanks to Bob Mottram for initially posting these.
March 31st, 2008 at 6:44 pm
Sigh. These singularity and transhuman ideas never seem to go away.
Much of the stuff on this site resembles the dot-com hype, but I just wanted to remind you that the bubble burst many years ago. Nearly all investment and research into the computer industry vanished in 2000, and there have been no major breakthroughs since 2002. Want proof? Here you go:
1.) The most often cited example of AI success is the event in which Deep Blue beat Kasparov, the world chess champion at that time. That occurred in 1997. Today, no computers have come close to defeating the best players in Go.
2.) Mass adoptation of the internet occurred in the 1990s. Today’s use of the internet to download music and video is nothing more than a bit of a refinement from the the 90s’ technology.
3.) Clock speeds reached 3.06 GHz in 2002. They haven’t been able to push this much higher since, and a 5GHz non-overclocked processor still doesn’t exist.
Because of slight increases in cache size, RAM, and cycles per clock, a single-threaded application today is a bit faster than in 2002. However, this difference is barely noticeable.
4.) The U.S and most developed companies are outsourcing jobs in the computer industry to India and China. This decreases talent by killing interest in computer science. In 2006, the number of computer science students was only half the number of 2000.
5.) The world is facing an imminent peak in world oil production. This is known as “peak oil”. While I doubt that it would destroy civilization, it would divert nearly all of society’s resources into developing alternative energy, not into developing an AI.
March 31st, 2008 at 9:13 pm
1) Beating humans at chess or go is only one facet of AI. Recent examples that I think of as advancements in AI include the Urban Grand Challenge, the mule packbot and a program recently developed that can ,with no prior knowledge, build a physical self model and start moving.
2) The internet gets used for a lot more than just entertainment . I solve problems many times faster on a daily basis by making use of the knowledge of others through the internet.
3) The general CPU may not be getting much faster, but the most advanced graphics cards are in the teraflop range. Supercomputers can break petaflop at anytime and plans are being made for exaflop in the early 2010’s.
4) The occurrence of a singularity does not require the leadership or the participation of the US. However the US is invited to participate.
5)Between coal reserves and finds such as the Bakken formation, there are plenty of buried carbon resources for fuel and products. The real issue is that the planet can not support billions of people living at the economic levels of the US while relying solely on those reserves.
April 1st, 2008 at 7:29 am
1) Look at the DARPA Grand Challenge. Isn’t that a breakthrough in AI development
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DARPA_Grand_Challenge)
2) A lot new uses came up since the 90s. Blogs, wikis, grid computing, social networks, youtube,… the face of the internet changed a lot. It also moved to mobile devices.
3) CPU clockrate isn’t the measurement for cumputational speed. A 1.83 GHz Core 2 Duo is faster than the 3 GHz Pentium 4.On the other hand there are cpus that fast - The POWER6 runs at 4.7. End User Programms don’t need to run faster anyway. Videos run smooth, games look better, the internet isn’t dependent on the cpu and so on.
4) Yes, so what. There is still need for software engeneering and design. But in the end I don’t care about the USA. It is only part of the world.
5) And this affects the singularity in what way exactly?
April 1st, 2008 at 2:35 pm
5) Or nearly all of society’s resources would be diverted into drilling for more oil.