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.

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.

Hehe.

Nineteen Eighty-Four is Singularity fiction!

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...

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

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

I think he means the technological singularity.

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

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...

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.

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?

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

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.)

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.


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.

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?

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.

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.

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

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



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.

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?

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.

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.

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."

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

Actually there are scientists working for DARPA working on the generation of stable tachyon fields, I'm not sure how much progress has actually been made but usually DARPA is pretty good at picking winning concepts to base a bunch of projects on, so it is concievable for us to see FTL as a reality in our lifetimes.

No idea what a stable tachyon field might bring, usable tech wise, but we never know.

It goes beyond that. The computers we're talking about here will most likely be self-organizing and adaptable, too a much higher degree than humans are today. They won't just have a set program they're running.

Unless I missed something, tachyons are totally hypothetical, and only found in more esoteric and unverified theories, and even there so unstable you'll have no way of observing them. Discovery of them, or even verification of a theory that predicted their existence, would be a major breakthrough.

And even if they did get as far as generating tachyons, that wouldn't allow you to actually travel FTL - how should tachyons be able to accelerate your mass beyond the speed of light? You might get a way of sending messages back in time, if it turns out tachyons break most of our current theories, and that could be interesting of course, but travel seems far fetched even for this.

FTL travel, that is the only use for it anyone has postulated credibly since the minimum speed of tachyons is the speed of light (we can only observe them indirectly due to the secondary effects), they are categorized as quantum particulates and don't follow what we understand as the laws of physics, if we can create a field of them and then entangle it temporarilly with another field of particles (technically at this level of physics that's all we are) we have ftl travel. It's believed that the exact speed of a vessel (and crew) entangled with a T-Field would be related to the ratio of normal-to-non-normal particles but that is just a hypothesis till we have T-Fields to test it with. I'm actually working on a hard sci-fi rpg that uses this theory as the basis for ftl.

...do you have a link on that research?

And the first thing I'd do when confronted by such a thing is to destroy it for the sake of humanity---part of being human is dealing with life's adversities. Not being nannied from cradle to grav.


To Draco: No the computer is not your friend. I am a mutant member of a secret society that has vowed to kill the computer, and any trouble shooters.

We can already make self-reprogramming programs. There's a problem though: the results are not deterministic. We don't know what the program would be doing post first-run (and ever run has a probability of what it might do, and as the runCount gets higher the probability of what is known about the program at that state before it runs goes down).

For the most part, we use computers for deterministic tasks, and don't need self-reprogramming programs.



Traitor!
(of course...I am too)

That is exactly what is going to change - we're going to start using machines for tasks that require intelligence, and we want them to learn and become smarter, come up with novel solutions.

if we have AI's that are taking over but also cheap fusion energy there is a simple old solution to totalitarian rule. LEAVE. why do we not have space tourism to the moon or mars? the fuel or energy cost makes it where only huge governments can afford it. so if a joul cost say a dollar today and you could make it cost 0.0001 dollars, instead of it costing 20 million for a man to get to the ISS it would take 2000 dollars.

and as far as who controls crops and energy, do you really think farmers will give up their land and let some govt/computer have everything? how about oil companies and their equipment and such? only way this sort of thing would happen is if it all gets nationalised first by some progressive regime to make things more "fair".

As far as automation making people useless, bollocks. automation and technology put farm hands out of work which were then availible to do textiles, later textiles had automation and technology put its workers out and another industry picked them up. technology and automation just means for each amount of work done alot more is produced.

I'll look for it but I was actually watching a show on Discovery so... might be a bit of a pain to find.

Ah hahahaha. That already happened. Might want to check this out.

so agricultural corporations mean what? its still owned by people. I dont think anyone would give up thier shares willingly to a computer.

oh and there are many many farms not owned by huge corporations. For cattle I know plenty of people who have a few hundrid to a few thousand acres that have a herd and every few years sells a bunch. For fruit production in mississippi and louisiana its basically all small and medium sized. In mississippi I know alot of vegtable production is done on medium size farm basis. only area of farming where I dont know anyone involved is chickens and pigs.

But thanks for the link, I'll send it to my mom she might want to put the farm on their local farm registry.

Acutally, in the United States, there already exist Executive Orders that give the central government the power to take ownership of any vehicle, public or private; enact Imminent Domain to take any property they want; relocate any person in the United States to any other location in the United States; force any person to accept a government position; and take all food, water, and fuel, public or private.

If they so decided, the central government could (completely legally) go to Person A's house in Dallas, Texas, and tell him that he is now a CPS Investigator in Spokane, Washington, and seize his two cars, 2 story house, all the food in his house, the drinks in his fridge, and extra kerosene in his garage, and put him on a plane to Spokane that day.

An example of something like this is what has happened to General Motors. The Government now owns a major share of the company, and is able to dictate who the CEO is and what pay he gets.

Also, look at what happened in the building of the new Texas Stadium. The city (and I know there's a difference between city, state, and central governments, but they can all use Imminent Domain) enacted Imminent Domain and forced people to move out of their houses in order to build a new waste of real-estate; I mean, football stadium.

I mean, seriously. Grown men are paid a thousand dollars a minute (more, probably) to carry a pig bladder down a cow pasture. They fight so hard over that one little ball, and I'm fairly sure each and every one of them can afford to buy their own.

A corporation is more motivated by greed than a singular person, as they are the amalgamations of the wills of several dozens to several million faceless "shareholders" who want their share value to rise (this is their primary motivation when making decisions), and increasing the share value means making a profit. Making a profit is either a) selling more product at the same price or b) lowering overhead costs (there's also "c" which involves more complicated math on higher and lower prices on products).

If reducing the number of paid, "meat humans" reduces the cost of the overhead, you can be rest assured that it will happen.

This will continue until there is only the CEO as he has replaced every person below him with a machine of one kind or another and can be very quickly replaced by a computer himself (as effectively all of his decisions are influenced by the "people" below him, which have been replaced by machines). Very few people have control over the existence of their own job, the CEO and Board of Directors included. If those positions are capable of being automated, then they will be at some point in the future. It may be decades it may be days, but it will happen as ultimately someone else has control over their position's existence.

If there are in fact a "ruling class" of CEOs and Boards of Directors that are still human due to having managed to maintain control over the computerized positions beneath them and are not oust-able from power you merely replace an AI Overlord with an elite maintainers class who control the AI, who ultimately will decide the same thing: "meat humans" are a drain on resource and must be eliminated.



Support them. Even if it costs more money, support them. It will be the only way to prevent the rise of the megacorps (Wal-Mart is already, what, an A level corp? It's actually responsible for highly industrialized automated workforce by itself: $2.97 for a gallon of pickles? Less than 2 cents profit split between Wal-Mart and Vlasic per jar).

Neraph are you arguing with me? your tone seems to suggest you are but what you are saying backs up my argument. just to make my point clear the US govt has been getting quite authoritarian and problematic and unconstitutional and stifleing since 1900. I do not know if the progressives will end up having total control or not but I certainly hope not.

So whats wrong with everyone being the CEO of their own corporation? or are you suggesting that some people are so useless they cant offer anything? the arguement that elimiating jobs is the end of society is kinda silly since if jobs were never eliminated we would still be an entirely agricultural economy and no cell phones or ipods would have been built because there would not have been a work force to build them or the machines that built the ipods.

Because either a) every corporation would have the value of the cash in your pocket right now with a good probability that you will be bought out and downsized within days or b) there would be a grand total of a few hundred thousand humans on the planet.

Note: scenario A leads to scenario B.

you do know there are quite a few people that start a business with very little cash and are sucessful right? most of those have something to do with the trades and are not manufacturers and have little use of a college degree.

Yes. I know. But not everyone, not every single one of the 6.5 billion people on the planet.

The point is, even if every one of these CEOs has only the money in their pocket at first it takes little thought to find someone with less money and buy "their company." At which point you own them and the money in their pocket (which is the sum of the money you had plus the money they had). You own the company and all its worth. You then fire the employee and keep his valuable assets (the cash in his pocket).

You now own a company of 1 and have twice the money you started with.

The other guy ceased to exist as a person.

you know when you buy a company you dont get to keep the money? Also, one person companies are generally tools and a dude. if you buy him out you would get the tools... used tools yay now the dude can go buy new ones.

In a "one person company" scenario you, as a company, own all of your possessions as "company assets" which you don't get to keep when you leave the company. If a merger happens then one company owns all of the possessions of the two parent companies, and if one person leaves they don't exactly get to keep anything.

And even if they do one-person companies quickly become "not" and we end up back where we started: highly industrialized low worker-number companies in which the elite few run the masses.

In anycase, the "money" in my initial scenario was an abstract representation of how a company is more than its employees and they benefit by gobbling up smaller corporations and shitting out their employees.

in a one person business 1) you dont have to incorporate in which case you cant be bought out unless slavery laws in the US are changed 2) its usually called an LLC if the business is incorporated; in which case the company owns what it buys and thats it, so if you buy a hammer with the company account then the company owns the hammer (company writes it off its taxes), if you buy a truck with profits (pays taxes on this) then you own the truck not the company.

See ninja edit.

Also, if we assume that you can't be bought out (because of laws and LLC and whatnot) then you can go out of business:

What are you selling? What service are you performing? Who are you giving it to?

If you do not have a market for business then you only have expenses. If you are working exclusively for another company, then you have essentially sold out and become an employee.

my point is not that life is easy just that those willing to compete should be able to offer something.

and I can think of a few business ventures that would only have expenses and would make some very large profits. the downside is they are probably illegal or at least gray enough where the govt would procecute anyway and win by misinformation.

In any case, you still either end up with only a handfull of real people or you end up with the real world and in either case don't actually make progress towards advancing society.