Are we approaching a technological Singularity?

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I think that the processing power isn't as important as the code/programming needed to get it to actually work. Take voice recognition for example. Five years ago the average computer finally had enough power to process it. But voice recognition programs still don't work very well today. Architecture of the system may be even more important. I think that the best way to program creativity or any other human trait, is to design something that is as similar to the human brain as possible.

Perhaps it's just because I'm a miserable sod, but I expect some of the opposite. If you understand the brain well enough to augment it significantly, you will also be able to reprogram your personality and even your basic processing. You could try being NT to see how much you like it, for example.

I doubt people will have the same wishes what their personalities should be. Whatever someone values, they will enhance. The aggressive will choose to be more aggressive, the ambitious will make their ambitions even stronger. If you want to have limitless compassion, you can have it. If you are religious, you can make sure you will never again have a crisis of faith. I expect a greater polarization of personalities, which will make mutual understanding harder. Increased intelligence might more than counter that problem, but only if you don't have people being intentionally blind to some arguments. I expect that ability to be enhanced as well.

Who will be the first to augment their brains, how far will they go, and what will they do with it? You can be sure that it will be expensive to start with. If it works, those who get it (the rich and ambitious) will have the mental capacity to concentrate even more wealth in their own hands and increase the gap. Right now, being rich gives you power, better education and longer life through better health, but it doesn't do a lot for your brain. That will change. There is a real possibility of an increasingly polarized caste system, in which being ahead at the start matters most, and catching up is hard.

If you share my outlook, you can either become a ruthless and ambitous bastard to get ahead in the scramble, you can refuse to trample others underfoot and take the consequences, or you can hope that I just ate the wrong cheese and I'm having a really bad dream.

Gromit

First, the Strong Turing Test. People have been predicting a 20-30 year timeframe for at least the past 20-30 years. As a result, I tend to be cautious on this. Speed is not the important issue, it's complexity. The largest supercomputer on Earth has only a few thousand nodes. The human brain has a few billion. The topology of a network of such complexity is beyond modern theoretical computing, and it is the topology that matters.

The number of interconnects in the brain is a better guide to the power of that brain than the number of cells. Even there, we don't have a good understanding. Crows have incredibly simple brains, but are quite capable of manufacturing tools from raw materials to solve problems. No computer is even coming close to such advanced thought. If we can't even compare with a crow today, how much longer can it be for us to compare a machine to humans? For that matter, since we don't even have a working definition of intelligence.

(The Turing Test looks at symptoms of intelligence, because even Alan Turing - as great as he was - could not devise anything better. The test completely fails to examine what intelligence actually is and so cannot examine if intelligence is actually present. All it can tell you is if the symptoms look the same, which puts it about on-par with eighteenth-century medicine.)

There is a problem with Strong AI, in that it is being tackled largely in an incorrect fashion. The consciousness isn't directly linked to the sensors, the brain makes no attempt to communicate every time from first principles, neurons are not driven by predicate logic, and so on. The human brain doesn't operate by predicate calculus. If it did, those with missing connectors on our mirror cells would not be aspie, we'd be indistinguishable from the neurotypicals. The differences aren't great enough, when considering the computing power of the brain as a whole, to be significant. It can only be significant if this is a topological/structural issue, not a raw MIPS/FLOPS count issue.

Interesting and thoughtful post, Gromit. Thanks.

That's what I'm hoping for. But then again, if you're interested in making yourself NT so you can be happy, couldn't you just reprogram yourself to be a happy aspie? What's the difference if you're happy either way, and being happy is what your aim is? Heh, you can take that train of thought off in weird directions. What's the difference between augmenting your penis with surgery/gene therapy and changing your brain chemistry so that you're happy with what you got? Either one gets you the same result: confidence with your member size (although if you're a hurdler the latter might be a better option).


That does, indeed, seem plausible when you put it that way. But of course, it might happen differently. After all, the rich are often complacent, and therefore might be slow to get on the train. Maybe the hungry ones will find ways to rise up and take advantage of the technology. It's hard to say what will happen or even if the governments will allow us to change ourselves.

My point before was that we might soon develop computers that can transfer brain waves of one brain to another. This might just be how we'll communicate with each other in the future, as opposed to phones or videophones. But it might have the added benefit of increasing communication fidelity, as language can be quite a barrier, as well as all of the silly little human things we do. I think it's generally accepted that as we progress into the future, there will be a lot more information out in the open and a lot less privacy. When we learn to live with ourselves wide open, everyone will understand each other better I think and there will be a lot of potential for understanding and compassion.

It's pretty interesting how close we're getting to these things I'm talking about. Here's a link to a device the US military is working on. This device will let people have phone conversations without actually saying anything. Sounds weird, huh?
http://www.tfot.info/content/view/80/58/


That indeed does sound plausible. Sounds a bit like Gattaca.



It sounds like what you're saying could happen. It hurts the brain to think about this stuff too much. So much speculation. I do hope that increased intelligence will cause people to act humanely.

It doesn't have to be your only aim. You could try being NT for a day to understand them better, to see whether there are elements of being NT you want to incorporate, or to develop an NT emulator, so that you can switch when you want to be nice. Sort of like switching to the language of the people you're talking to, to make things easier for them. Be nice to them, and you would be more likely to encourage them to try being aspie, to see what that is like.

If you could reprogram your own mind, others would be able to do it as well. The equivalent of antivirus software and firewalls would be more important if you risk not just broadcasting spam and wiping your hard drive, but wiping your mind.

Gromit

That is a full hit. Applause!

I think it's more likely that there are only a finite number of rules that guide the physical universe and within the next couple hundred years we'll have them figured out with or without strong AI. In that respect our species is going through something that resembles a technological adolescence from which we will eventually emerge, I don't know what our society will look like at that point however.

When the Cold War ended, people got all panicky and started talking nonsensically about "the end of history." I think this is just as nonsensical. There will always be a new frontier, we just don't know what it is yet.

I believe that processing power of computers will continue to rise exponentially for many years into the forseeable future. Research into AI and neural networks increases, as well as nanotechnology to manufacture transistors at the molecular scale, will means its very likely that in the next 20 years there will be computers that can process information at the speed of the human brain (100 Tflops vs. 4 Gflops of top end PCs). In addition advances in neural network will manifest hardware and software that will self-learn and self-program. At this point, computer will start to become more intelligent than humans and develop technology and tools that are more advanced than humans. Also, I hope that humans and computers can exist as a symbiosis so that we depend on each other, hopefully NOT like "The matrix", but with more tangible benefits accorded to the humans such as longer and heathier lives, with lots of fun things to do. A technological singularity point would then be when humans can no longer keep up with the robots/computers.

if things keep going t this rate we will hit the Nano age in a centurys time

The opposite is going to happen when we reach the technological singularity if there is even such a thing. I'm not even sure about the existence of such a singularity. When would it ever stop? When we would ever stop having major breakthroughs with technology that change our lives forever?

We've already had events like those in the past that have changed our lives forever. Perhaps there are multiple singularities.

And, if anything, in the future we will become less dependent on technology and find out how to utilize the human mind to its full potential. No one on earth yet understands the limits of the human mind.

Depending on technology instead of understanding ourselves more is similar to traveling into space while we have vast unexplored regions at the bottom of the pacific.

We will become more sensitive creatures in the future, because no computer can ever have the five senses; if it did it would be called a human and then we would basically be god, creating life.

Nah, I don't think the revolutionary aspect of the singularity will be the result of the technology being so advanced but out of a revelation that we, humans, are the ultimate computers.