Blogging Against the Singularity Tuesday, Jun 16 2009
singularity 4:19 am
There’s a new anti-Singularity blog in Internet town — Blogging Against ‘The Future’ (originally “Blogging Against the Singularity”). It does a reasonable job of summarizing and consolidating a few of the more interesting anti-Singularity arguments. Most of these types of arguments consist of marveling about the complexity of the brain and making the implicit assumption that we have to copy primate brains precisely, all the way down to microtubules and dendrites, in order to produce intelligence.
At first, I noticed the site when it claimed that I used name-calling in my debate with Horgan, when I didn’t. Only Horgan used name-calling and a generally aggressive, bullying stance, which sadly I expected. I’m actually somewhat concerned about the cultist meme, because I don’t want myself or my friends or family to be threatened down the line when and if AI technology starts to take off more visibly and makes more people concerned (and possibly angry) about the Singularity. This might sound like a lame counter-argument, but it should be noted that I’ve spent many years just not caring about being called a cultist and only recently started to worry about potential long-term consequences.
As the Wikipedia page on Singularitarianism notes, “some green anarchist militants have taken singularitarian rhetoric seriously enough to have called for violent direct action to stop the Singularity”. That bothers me somewhat — why can’t I organize and/or participate in Singularity-related events without being at least a tiny bit worried that “Unabomber — Part Deux” is going to run in with a dynamite vest and blow us all to kingdom come? I guess it’s difficult to ask for journalists to pull punches. I suppose their job is to say what they honestly think. I am somewhat torn on the issue.
Anyway, it’s an alright blog. There aren’t too many posts, so I suggest reading the whole thing if you’re interested.
Actually, the job of a journalist is NOT to say what they THINK – it’s to record history with as little bias as they can muster. Problem is, I think most journalists haven’t read a single article on what bias actually is…
Which is part of the problem with much of mainstream journalism these days.
As to the argument that you can’t duplicate a human brain (or any biological process), my response is that if it happened naturally through evolution, then it should be able to be duplicated eventually, given enough resources.
Anyway, I don’t know a single Singularitarian who would argue that the brain ISN’T complex and emulation of said WON’T be one of the most difficult engineering problems we ever face.
Hey Michael,
Thanks for the bump!
I’m quite glad to get a star for being the reasonable consolidator of interesting arguments :)
As for what I believe about intelligence, I’m not sure I got there yet. On some level, I think that consciousness “simply” arises from a complex interaction of many different parts (like an autocatalytic set). And I think that consciousness could be run on many different mediums. It could be computer software. It could be a billion Chinese people sending signals to another according the certain rules. One of my assertions, yes, is that the primate brain (our usual model) does seem to be rather complicated and hard to figure out. But that’s to be expected: it took evolution millions of years to assemble it (haphazardly, I might add) and my argument is that I don’t think we’ll come to know how it works within the next few decades. I could always be proved wrong.
Personally, I would never advocate for violence against Singularitarians (or any cult, or any human beings, for that matter) and I sincerely hope that there aren’t green anarchist unabombers with any capabilities out there.
Again, thanks!
I think there is the possibility of vigilante luddites, especially as it becomes more obvious that automation is advancing into non-traditional areas of the job market.
If you put yourself into the public arena there is always the chance of becoming fodder for the lunatic fringe of humanity, of which there seems to be an endless supply.
In my opinion singularitarians and those in favour of AGI should do whatever they can to steer clear of being described as “cultists”, because that tag will eventually be used to sideline or dismiss research and cut academic or venture capital funding. So for example when some singularitarians talk about a post-singular world being a “utopia” they should probably not use that word to describe it, or try to define exactly what they mean. Talking about “utopia” to me suggests only a very shallow and superficial examination of possible future outcomes.
Arnie, the basic idea among most in AI is that the brain won’t need to be emulated to create intelligence. The Wright Flyer was not an emulation of a pigeon.
What I mean of course is that we can create intelligence. The human brain is the only baseline we have, but I agree we probably don’t need to duplicate/emulate it. My post was poorly worded in that regard, and didn’t reflect my actual meaning.
My overall point is that if intelligence was created “accidentally” through non-deterministic evolutionary processes, it follows the same basic laws of physics, and it should certainly be possible to create it artificially. In fact, we can see where the biological brain is limited. It’s major advantage is parallel processing, but even so, the human brain is only as smart as it has to be – and no smarter. I don’t think it’s hubris to think we can duplicate its intelligence and improve on it.
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