top 10 signs the signularity has arrived Options

[TheWanderingJewe...]

10) You're late to work because can't remember where you left the encryption keys to your backup consciousness cache.

9) TV watches you more than you watch it.

(IMG:style_emoticons/default/cool.gif) Your divorce proceedings include nasty fight over who owns the source code to your wife's operating system.

7) Your cats have higher incomes and several more advanced degrees than you. Occasionally, they let you pet them while they do differential calculus (they think you're so cute when you do that).

6) You're evicted from your body, which is seized by the county and sold for back taxes.

5) More computers own people than people own computers. Video game violence takes on an entirely new meaning.

4) Civilization collapses and rebuilds itself several times during your daily commute to work. This generally causes you only a slight delay.

3) Political analysts are surprised when third-party AI candidate is elected President with 99.99999% of the vote as several trillion voters are created minutes before polls close.

2) Goldfish crackers beg you for mercy, try to wriggle away, then scream when you bite into them. Your kids love this.

1) "Blue Screen of Death" no longer just a figure of speech.

[Draco18s]

Hehe.

[Heath Robinson]

9) TV watches you more than you watch it.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is Singularity fiction!

[hobgoblin]

given that companies showed of TVs with built in skype and HD video cameras, its closer to real then one may think...

hell, watching the blogs and stuff from CES this year was like standing on the event horizon. AR glasses, drones controlled by phones, used for AR games, all kinds of new, always connected, computing devices...

[Neraph]

It was my understanding that the Singularity is what (theoretically) exploded to create all the order and laws we see in the universe.

[Daylen]

I think by singularity they mean SR setting and reality being the same.

[Draco18s]

I think he means the technological singularity.

Which, curiously, hasn't happened by SR times.

[hobgoblin]

thank the awakening and following events for that...

still, crash 2.0 was potentially close to it, in a very negative way, had not deus gone bsod...

[Draco18s]

Oh, a technological singularity is not a good thing. Ray Kurzweil is very optimistic about the future and the role of computers and such, but he fails to take into account human nature, namely greed.

Any future in which a technological singularity exists doesn't need us.

[Daylen]

If the price of energy goes down in inverse proportion to technology advancing then it doesnt matter if we are "needed".

[Draco18s]

If the price of energy goes down in inverse proportion to technology advancing then it doesnt matter if we are "needed".

So you're OK with being a subservient race to computers, then? Computers that dictate foreign policy, crop growth, job hiring/firing, economic stability, and such?

Computers, who at any time, could decide that because we're not needed we're a drain (albeit a small one) on their resources and kill us all off?

[hobgoblin]

sounds like someone should read this:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-stati...ando-intro.html

[Tiny Deev]

So you're OK with being a subservient race to computers, then? Computers that dictate foreign policy, crop growth, job hiring/firing, economic stability, and such?

Not much different from now, in my opinion. I never dictated crop growth, job hiring/firing, or economic stability, neither was I ever consulted on the foreign policy. Things are already mostly out of our hands, the only difference would be if it was a person who is corruptable and egocentric and greedy, or if its a computer who is logical and egocentric possibly killing us all.

Either a person who has no problem doing anything to live how he wants, or a computer who has no problem doing anything to live. Honestly, I can't decide which is worse.

(Ofcourse, this is only if you believe in conspiracies.)

[Blade]

Computers that dictate foreign policy, crop growth, job hiring/firing, economic stability, and such?

Right now, I have Sarkozy, the biggest companies and something that's totally out of control called "the economy" doing it. And I'm pretty sure computers could do it better.
I trust a computer more than I'd trust the aforementioned.

I'm ok with not being needed due to computers and robot doing everything for us.

Computers, who at any time, could decide that because we're not needed we're a drain (albeit a small one) on their resources and kill us all off?

I'm pretty sure this could be avoided with good programming and practices.
And that's not so different from today's society letting unemployed people die because they're not needed and welfare is a drain on their resources.

[Heath Robinson]

So you're OK with being a subservient race to computers, then? Computers that dictate foreign policy, crop growth, job hiring/firing, economic stability, and such?

So you're OK with being a subservient race to nation-states, then? Nation-states that dictate foreign policy, crop growth, job hiring/firing, economic stability, and such?

[hobgoblin]

And that's not so different from today's society letting unemployed people die because they're not needed and welfare is a drain on their resources.

given the increasing automation in the world, i cant help wonder if welfare no longer is a drain, but rather that our economic thinking have yet to wake up to the potential post-scarcity, or have figured it out and is suppressing it.

one thing tho is that choice mostly equals waste, as if one can choose between multiple meals, unless they are made from base components that are the same after the choice, the rest is wasted. So basically, made to order is less wasteful then our current mass prefabrication system.

[Smokeskin]

And that's not so different from today's society letting unemployed people die because they're not needed and welfare is a drain on their resources.

Except meat humans won't be equals, like unemployed people are. Meat humans will be to AIs and posthumans as ants are to meat humans. It probably won't take long before meat humans won't be seen as anything worth considering.

[Smokeskin]

given the increasing automation in the world, i cant help wonder if welfare no longer is a drain, but rather that our economic thinking have yet to wake up to the potential post-scarcity, or have figured it out and is suppressing it.

Post-scarcity is a myth. There will always be resource bottlenecks in a competitive system.

[Draco18s]

Not much different from now, in my opinion.

Point #1 on why Ray Kurzweil is wrong about the future (yes, I actually expected your answer).

sounds like someone should read this:
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-stati...ando-intro.html

I have either read it, was supposed to read it, or have been meaning to read it but lost it.

I've forgotten which. In any case it's back on my reading list.

[hobgoblin]

Post-scarcity is a myth. There will always be resource bottlenecks in a competitive system.

maybe so, but basics like food and clothing are being increasingly automated in terms of production.

[Smokeskin]

maybe so, but basics like food and clothing are being increasingly automated in terms of production.

Everything is being automated. In 30 years tops, the human body won't have any sort of mechanical or mobility advantage or be more cost effective, and AIs will be much more capable and much cheaper. There'll be no work for meat humans.

Automated doesn't mean free, and meat humans have no income. Why should companies be making products for people who can't pay for them? They'll still be making stuff for the people who still have money, most likely wealthy shareholders, but that will only be a minority of meat humans. Most companies will be making products and providing services to other companies only.

Of course, there's the option of the state collecting taxes and giving out welfare. But calling that post-scarcity is like calling today post-scarcity since that option is fully available now, it depends completely on how good welfare the state provides. With nearly all voters being unemployed, welfare policies would be expected to change though. With globalization and companies' ability to move to low tax countries, this might not be a viable option, and you also have to look at how poorly states tend to function when they go for robin hood policies. If only the unemployed had a vote, what do you think the politicians would do? Would they provide for a dynamic economy, or try to overdo eachother in promising to give more and more welfare benefits through higher and higher company taxes? How would companies respond in a globalized world?

[Cray74]

The thing about "technological singularities," at least as commonly posited, is that they're points where the future beyond which is unimaginable to earlier populations. However, they're probably not too obvious to the folks in the middle of an ongoing singularity. The original post's examples fit the bill: singularity-type events incomprehensible to someone in 1900, but comprehensible to us now and daily, and only mundane problems to a person of that singularity period.

This leads to a thought: we're entering (or have entered) a singularity now. Look at 2010AD (the real one, not SR's) in comparison to the average life of 200 years ago.

1) An inexpensive pocket item allows anyone to talk to anyone else almost anywhere on the planet, assuming they have the right phone number and cell (or satellite) coverage. I know I would've been surprised in 1985 to hear that one day I'd talk to my parents from my car while they stood in the empty fields of Stone Henge, or that I'd sit in my office and help my brother navigate his way out of a swamp using cell phones, navigation satellites, and high resolution satellite imagery. Someone in 1810 would probably have no clue what I was talking about.

2) A majority of killer diseases are held at bay with a course of a few pills from your local pharmacy or needle sticks in childhood, rather than being a mysteries that exterminate half of children by age 5 and many adults by age 40.

3) If that pharmacy is 25 miles away, you can get there and back in an hour or two rather than two to four days. This travel is accomplished with a vehicle that can move three times as fast as any race horse (if you ignore speed limits), is built with thousands of pounds of steel, and has a heart weighing a few hundred pounds that delivers the strength of a gang of 50 to several hundred horses. The majority of adults in Europe and North America have these.

4) For an average person's biweekly salary, it's possible to book a (budget, off-season) trip across an ocean. This travel is accomplished in about one day (instead of weeks) using a 100- to 500-ton vehicle that travels at 550mph (instead of 5-15mph), develops more power than you could find in a populous county, and is readily accessible to almost any social class.

5) Returning to the idea of steel, global weekly production of steel is greater than the sum of all steel made by all civilizations before 1810 (give or take).

6) Computers. Try explaining how they're built and why they're so important when the past 250,000 years of homo sapiens sapiens got along fine without them. In fact, try explaining a few computer industry lawsuits to someone from 1810. You might get the idea across, but it'll sound like "Your divorce proceedings include nasty fight over who owns the source code to your wife's operating system."

Weirdness like that, which is difficult for someone of prior periods to imagine or comprehend, defines a singularity.

Point being: keep an eye on the world around you. You're probably further into a singularity than you realize. You don't have to wait for your cat to come home with a third PhD while you're stuck in your dead-end lunar mining robot teleoperation job to be in a singularity.

[Draco18s]

The thing about "technological singularities," at least as commonly posited, is that they're points where the future beyond which is unimaginable to earlier populations.

The roads must roll.

But you are correct, there are many singularities, but I think we're talking about the next one, which is--for us--impossible to imagine. Such an example is faster than light travel, we can postulate the existence, but can not conceive of its construction.* Another is time travel.** Not that we're likely to see any of those any time soon, or ever, because the Next Big Thing we cannot conceive.


*One of the best, and likely probable, scenarios I've seen is from a "not exactly a TV show" called Virtuality where they detonated some 180 nukes behind the ship and rode the explosion wave. It has problems, but might be possible to achieve near-light speeds.

**There was some thing on the radio last night mimicking a conference on time travel and having a traveler show up and his non-explanation on how time wasn't how we conceive it.

[Warlordtheft]

I trust a computer more than I'd trust the aforementioned.

And what do you do when the computer isn't programmed properly. Oh it needs to fixed, so now our lives are in the hands of the computer's programmers. Thanks, but no thanks.

To quote Chruchhill "Democracy is the worst form of government, except all the others."

[Draco18s]

And what do you do when the computer isn't programmed properly. Oh it needs to fixed, so now our lives are in the hands of the computer's programmers.

The computer is your friend, Citizen. Don't you trust Friend Computer?