Singularitarian Friday, Sep 19 2008
singularity 5:06 pm
What happened to “Singularitarian” being defined as someone who follows the Singularitarian Principles? Dr. Jones and others who contributed to the IEEE Special Issue on the Singularity mostly use the term to describe Ray Kurzweil and his fans, but for five years between 2000 and 2005 the word applied to a different, yet overlapping group with radically distinct beliefs:
- no fixed timeline
- no argument that all of history has been predeterministically building up to this point
- no argument that technological progress is slowing down, speeding up, moving sideways, or any other such specific claims
- no particular attention given to pre-transhuman intelligence technologies except insofar as they influence when and how superintelligence is created
- central focus on superintelligence as a distinct technological milestone
- acceptance of the point that deliberately designed AGI may exist before neuromorphic AGI
- acceptance of the fact that we might completely blow ourselves up before the Singularity hits
- acceptance of the fact that the first superintelligence might not give a damn about us, and just decide to rearrange our atoms into something more to its liking (like tiling the universe with instantiations of the deity Yog-Sothoth, or something equally ridiculous)
- no magical rosy scenario where human upgrades and AGI research coincidentally fuse seamlessly in a way that happens to completely benefit mankind
- acknowledgment of the Everest-sized challenge of creating AGI that doesn’t eliminate us outright, rather than hand-waving it over with “maintaining an open free-market system for incremental scientific and technological progress, in which each step is subject to market acceptance, will provide the most constructive environment for technology to embody widespread human values” (The Singularity is Near, pg 420). Yeah, right.
- etc…
“Singularitarian” used to mean making minimal assumptions: that superintelligence is possible, it could have a huge impact on the world, and our actions now may influence the final outcome. Now, it comes with a huge set of baggage that I wouldn’t wish on anybody.
15 Responses to “Singularitarian”
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September 19th, 2008 at 9:11 pm
Kurzweil is a complete fraud and a nincompoop who needs to be drummed out of the Singularitarian community.
September 20th, 2008 at 4:57 am
The term has become tainted. The future has been tarnished. By whom? How? What can be done to remedy the situation?
Bring Singularity version 1993 back!
September 20th, 2008 at 10:48 am
That’s life. Over time, ideological labels always gather connotations with which various adherents disagree. Such are the detriments. On the other hand, they also have their benefits, giving us the ability to provide quick approximating descriptions of our selves. It is naive to assume that a self-described adherent to a particular ideology agrees with everything expressed in the name of that ideology, but it is laboriously inefficient and usually a poor choice to attempt to disregard ideological labels entirely — I use “attempt” because it appears altogether impossible to avoid them entirely, given that words (or any other symbols) ultimately have the same interpretive limitations as ideologies.
September 20th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Well, as nothing can be done about it, I think it’s time to move on. Luckily, I think I’ve already found my next ism & ology.
http://cosmeng.org/
Cosmic Engineerology, Cosmic Engineerism, or is it Cosmic Engineeritarianism?
Yep, I like the sound of that.
-Who are you?
-I’m a Comic Engineer.
September 21st, 2008 at 12:31 pm
The Cosmic Engineers look like a straightforward cult, entirely ditching any pretense of scientific credibility.
I was unaware of the pre-Kurzwilian singularists. With their more watered down predictions (you could call them “warmed over Moravec”) I might even be in danger of being one.
In particular I agree that smarter than human intelligence (or even nearly as smart as human) will not necessarily lead to a magically utopian future where all ills are overcome and everyone lives for ever. It remains entirely possible that we could “blow ourselves up” or do something equally stupid before superintelligence really gets started. Non human intelligences will also in my opinion be distinctly non human, and therefore not necessarily obsessed with fulfilling every whim of their forebears.
September 21st, 2008 at 2:45 pm
I agree, I’m also missing the spirit of those optimistic days of the early Singularity in 2000 or even before.
That has gone. Now, we listen mostly about perils.
Yet, a lot has been done, nearly enough in the field of fast supercomputers, what was expected anyway. Today, the fastest supercomputer is as fast as the 500 fastest supercomputers combined in the year - 2004!
And we have an idea, how to start a self optimizing process on one of these arriving machines.
Do we need more? I don’t think we do. Perfectly workable and habitable Singularity may come out of this in at most a decade, I reckon.
September 21st, 2008 at 9:19 pm
Re: Cosmic Engineerology, Cosmic Engineerism, or is it Cosmic Engineeritarianism?
Nice. But one of the reasons to choose this name was that it is not easily converted to -ism or -logy.
Re: I agree, I’m also missing the spirit of those optimistic days of the early Singularity in 2000 or even before. That has gone. Now, we listen mostly about perils.
Yes. When I plan a holiday, I know that it can spoiled by bad weather and I don’t need to be constantly reminded. I prefer to plan the holiday in happy anticipation, and deal with bad weather if and when it comes.
September 22nd, 2008 at 5:03 pm
I prefer to plan the holiday in happy anticipation, and deal with bad weather if and when it comes.
You don’t understand. This kind of bad weather will KILL YOU.
September 22nd, 2008 at 8:19 pm
In this case, a lack of holiday will also kill you. So plan the holiday, including reasonable preparations for bad weather.
September 23rd, 2008 at 3:39 am
Re: This kind of bad weather will KILL YOU
So can many other things, including boredom. If I plan a trip to a place with possible heavy weather, of course I will pack suitable survival gear and learn how to use it. But after doing that, I still prefer to plan the holiday in happy anticipation, and deal with bad weather if and when it comes.
September 23rd, 2008 at 10:47 am
No. This is not a holiday. Bad weather will KILL not just you but EVERYTHING, FOREVER. Boredom and even individual deaths do not REMOTELY measure up. We have to get it right the first time.
I happily anticipate possible good futures, but I don’t let it affect how I consider risks.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:00 pm
So do I Nick. I take risks very seriously. And if there were no or few transhumanists talking of risks, I would be one of the first to remind others that, associated to our solar visions, there may be important risks that must be avoided.
But I feel that now there are more than enough transhumanists mainly concerned with risks, and prefer reading other things. Even if I think Kurzweil is far too optimist in his timeline, I appreciate his enthusiastic vision.
People should, I think, follow their main inclinations. There are those inclined to talk about risks, and those inclined to talk about opportunities. A balanced vision emerges from the contributions of both. Everyone knows that AIDS can kill: there are those who think of the risk of AIDS all the time, and others who take reasonable precautions and then enjoy sex.
September 24th, 2008 at 8:52 am
Utilitarian-wise, we’re forced to pay a lot of attention to risks until their annual probability is much lower, whether we like it or not, or whether we’re inclined to or not. It’s quite unfortunate really. A balanced vision rationally assigns a huge percentage of attention to risk management, because at the present time in history the risk is unusually huge.
Far more futurists and transhumanists focus on the opportunities than risks.
If we’re planning to live for millions of years, why don’t we take care of risks now and put the necessary systems in place to stop them, instead of always having to worry?
September 24th, 2008 at 12:44 pm
We could call ourselves the Elder Singularitarians.
September 25th, 2008 at 5:36 pm
Always a great pleasure to know you review the postings here, Eliezer, and comment occasionally. But as Wittgenstein (and Austin, Ryle, and Waismann, among still others) finally drove-the-point-home, language and especially specific words or terms (and especially colloquial, as distinguished from sci-tech, words and terms) evolve and “mutate” under a social “marinating” process. As a nifty-fifty-yr-old, I can well-recall a time when the word “gay” simply meant “happy” and/or “light-hearted”. The word has now been all-but-commandeered over the last 3-4 decades to mean what people now (at least initially, w/o further qualification) take it to mean in coversation…
I, too, am a bit of a “purist” when it comes to the word or term, “Singularity”. Generally, it is the point at which a technological species develops a separate, stand-alone, instantiation of intelligence-greater-than-itself (i.e., to disambiguate, greater than the “originating” species itself). More specifically in our case, of course, this reduces down to “greater-than-**human**-intelligence”, which would indeed lead to I.J. Good’s “intelligence EXPLOSION”. We may characterize or liken, admittedly (Eliezer!) somewhat crudely and imprecisely, what Eliezer and others are trying to do is develop a “shaped”, “controlled” EXPLOSION, analogous (very, very loosely, again, admittedly) to the shaped and controlled *implosion* which triggers a fission-change-reaction in one’s garden-variety (Fat Man, Little Boy) plutonium (or U-238 for that matter) fission bomb.
The Singularity-as-Tech-Developmental-Hyperexponential-Inflection-Point is nonetheless interesting, as can be seen as, in effect, converging toward a Singularity in the first sense. There does seem to be synergizingly-compounding hyperexponential acceleration of sci-tech progress occurring, as various people, John Smart and Kurzweil (and good ol’ Bucky Fuller) among them, have been pointing-out for fairly-many years now.
At nifty-fifty, I suppose I quality as an Elder Sinularitarian! :) ;)
Much affection to you all…!