Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge Saturday, Apr 25 2009
superintelligence 3:41 pm
This was in the first issue of H+ magazine, but now it’s featured at the website:
Singularity 101 with Vernor Vinge
My stance on Vinge’s position on the Singularity is that he’s too loose with the concept, and seems to slightly welcome people redefining it as agriculture or something else that has no relationship to the concept of smarter-than-human intelligence.
I actually agree with Vernor when he says he’d be surprised if the Singularity doesn’t happen by 2030. It could very well happen after then, but still, I’d be surprised.
He also seems to take a morally detached view of the Singularity — like, “The Singularity is something that could affect everyone on the planet for the profoundly better or worse, but I prefer to view it as an abstract intellectual concept rather than something that will actually affect people.”
I’m a wee bit surprised that you agree with such an early date for the Singularity, although if you take first appearance of smarter-than-human as your reference, rather than its exponentially diverging from what we can conceive consequences, you may be right (but then is is a Singularity?).
If memory serves me, Ray Kurzweil, who is often regarded as optimistic, places the Singularity around 2045, despite the fact that his projections show greater computer capacity much earlier.
Which begs the question: how can we apprehend the distinction between human+ computer power, AGI, and Singularity?
This appears to be a(n) (abbreviated?) transcript of the interview that’s on The Singularity Institute’s website. See
SIAI Interview Series 2008 – Vernor Vinge
for streaming video
and
the SIAI interview page for a download version.
Yesterday I watched Ben Goertzel’s relaxed, informal presentation of his ideas in a 2006 video titled Artificial General Intelligence and its Potential Role in the Singularity.
While I was recovering my Windows machine from yet another system crash, a friend remarked “Where’s your singularity now?” Haha, we laughed. And if you look at the day-to-day record of small technology failures, it’s not hard to think that Vinge, Kurzweil, et. al, are merely pie-in-the-sky dreamers who hope something like the singularity will happen. My friend believes they are.
But progress of any sort builds on the successes and failures (and the successes of fixing the failures) in incremental, almost invisible steps. 2030? 2045? Post-human? Trans-human? Damned if I know. What I DO know is that my own life has become infinitely more interested than I could ever have imagined when I was a kid, based on the astounding growth in technology. Do we ever reach that Singularity moment? I don’t know, but I would not be a bit surprised.
This plausibly affects Kurzweil’s Singularity; but concluding anything about an intelligence explosion from it seems roughly as valid as concluding that (random analogy time) complex computer-controlled airplanes will never be reliable enough for people to entrust their lives to them. General reliability of software has only weak implications for specific applications in which designers go out of their way to ensure robustness.
‘…he’s too loose with the concept, and seems to slightly welcome people redefining it as argiculture or something else that has no relationship to the concept of smarter-than-human intelligence.’
Or maybe humans prove their stupidity daily by not implementing winning ideas such as vertical farming or solar towers. Maybe being smarter-than-human means doing the right thing before it becomes an emergency. Or perhaps it means having a computer tell the ruling class what is obvious, and that by implementing the model(s) will result in money saved and happy subjects and guarantee their re-election.
Assuming ofcourse that the AI is independent, and not a goverment bitch.
?…What do you do if your Roomba tells you it’s not in your best interest to go to work–ever again?
Get my Roomba the Roomba-equivalent of a high-class hooker.
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