Monthly Archives: June 2010

Yesterday I spoke to Nikola Danaylov at the Singularity Weblog. The title of the podcast comes from a quote I made during the interview, when Nikola asked me whether or not he thought we would need to sacrifice aspects of our humanity to go through a Technological Singularity. My response was that if we do the Singularity right, we need not compromise in any fashion: human beings from techno-enthusiasts to the Amish will be enthusiastic with the results.

During the podcast, Nikola asked me what I thought humanity’s chance of surviving the Singularity would be, and I said that my current estimate was around 25%, but that could change depending on what happens, and how much effort is put towards a positive Singularity.

John Horgan goes on the offensive against the Singularity concept on his relatively new blog at SciAm.

My own skepticism is based on simple comparisons of Kurzweil’s claims with what is actually happening in science. For example, Kurzweil contends that reverse-engineering the brain isn’t that big a deal. “The brain is at least 100 million times simpler than it appears because the design is in the genome,” he wrote on the blog Posthumans. “The compressed genome is only about 50 million bytes,” which is “a level of complexity we can handle.”

I agree with John that this estimate of the difficulty of AI is an oversimplification. It carries the assumption that AI will be a copy of the human brain, which isn’t necessarily true. It also ignores the complexity of the process of neurogenesis and continued development. The real brain is much, much more complex than the portion of the genome that codes for it, and it probably won’t be until after the Singularity until we understand the details of how the brain is created from the genetic …

From the letters to the editor section of The New York Times…

Sizing Up the Singularity

To the Editor:

Re “Merely Human? So Yesterday” (June 13), which described the Singularity movement and how it envisions a world of mind merging with machine, to conquer disease and even old age:

But if the movement succeeds beyond its wildest dreams, the world it would create could destroy all that we are that is of true value: our suffering and thus our joy, against which we determine the value of everything else.

Achilles, as depicted in the movie “Troy,” put it well: “I’ll tell you a secret. Something they don’t teach you in your temple. The Gods envy us. They envy us because we’re mortal, because any moment might be our last. Everything is more beautiful because we’re doomed. You will never be lovelier than you are now. We will never be here again.”

Let us never stop striving for us, but let us do it as us so that we still have reason for striving.

Ryan Andrews

Columbia, Mo., June …