Is a technological singularity ever going to happen?

Discussion in 'The Guru's Pub' started by Cybermancer, Nov 4, 2009.

  1. seaplane pilot

    seaplane pilot Guest

    Messages:
    1,295
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    2080Ti Strix
    LOL ! Holly Crap this is a funny photo.
    I want a poster of this to hang on the wall.
     
  2. Makalu

    Makalu Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,196
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    EVGA 8800 Ultra
    well I consider attempts to create a superhuman intelligent machine more of an exercise in futility then a controversy.

    I know you weren't claiming that Edison invented the light bulb...I was just pointing out that somebody did and it took many years to perfect and so far nobody has invented a conscious thinking machine.

    yeah yeah I know Kurzweil from my MIDI work in the 80's...I'm not impressed with the appeal to authority...notice he has no authority in AI or nanotechnology and we still haven't perfected speech recognition. He speculates on the future and nobody knows the future so I consider my speculations to be just as "authoritative".

    I'll share this and let others work on an algorithm for satire....

    It took a leisurely 70 years after King Gillette invented the safety razor for someone to come up with the idea that twin blades might be—or, at least sell—better. Since then, the pace of change has accelerated, as blade after blade has been added to razors in an attempt to tech-up the “shaving experience”.

    For the most cynical shavers, this evolution is mere marketing. Twin blades seemed plausible. Three were a bit unlikely. Four, ridiculous. And five seems beyond the pale. Few people, though, seem willing to bet that Gillette's five-bladed Fusion is the end of the road for razor-blade escalation. More blades may seem impossible for the moment—though strictly speaking the Fusion has six, because it has a single blade on its flip-side for tricky areas—but anyone of a gambling persuasion might want to examine the relationship between how many blades a razor has, and the date each new design was introduced.

    [​IMG]

    This relationship (see chart) suggests shavers are going to get more blades whether they need them or not. However, just like Moore's law—the observation that computer chips double in power every 18 months or so—it seems that technology as well as marketing determines the rate at which new blades are introduced.

    It is simply not possible to add a new blade whenever the marketing department wants one. Every additional blade, explains Michele Szynal, a spokeswoman at Gillette, adds weight and size to a razor. Firms must therefore find ways of making both razor and blades lighter, which means thinner blades, more closely spaced, made of special materials, with new coatings.

    So what does the future hold? With only five data-points, it is hard to be sure exactly which mathematical curve is being followed. If it is what is known as a power law, then the 14-bladed razor should arrive in 2100. The spate of recent innovation, however, suggests it may be a hyperbola. In that case, blade hyperdrive will be reached in the next few years and those who choose not to sport beards might be advised to start exercising their shaving arms now.
     
  3. Makalu

    Makalu Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,196
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    EVGA 8800 Ultra
    or like Kurzweil you can pay $150,000 to have your body cryogenically preserved...no matter that there's no science for resuscitating people and the damage may be irreversible and the process itself does even more damage....just lie there and have blind faith in The Machine to reanimate your fish fingers lol
     
  4. Cybermancer

    Cybermancer Don Quixote

    Messages:
    13,795
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    BFG GTX260OC (192 SP)
    Ha. Nice post, Makalu. :D

    I guess, in the end there are just as many arguments that are in favor of a technological singularity as there are arguments against it.

    Here's another interesting video from the 2009 Singularity Summit titled "Neural Substrates of Consciousness and the 'Conscious Pilot' Model" by Professor Stuart Hameroff:

     

  5. Makalu

    Makalu Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,196
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    EVGA 8800 Ultra
    Mary's Room - argument against physicalism, the philosophical position holding that mind and consciousness is a physical thing in every sense and that thing is the brain.

    The Thought Experiment:

    Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like ‘red’, ‘blue’, and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence ‘The sky is blue’.

    Question: What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not?

    In other words, we are to imagine a scientist who knows everything there is to know about the science of color, but has never experienced color. The interesting question it raises is: Once she experiences color, does she learn anything new?

    Ontologically, the following argument is contained in the thought experiment:

    (P1) Any and every piece of physical knowledge in regards to human color vision has been obtained (by the test subject, Mary) prior to her release from the black-and-white room. She has all the physical knowledge on the subject.

    (P2) Upon leaving the room and witnessing color first-hand, she obtains new knowledge.

    (C) There was some knowledge about human color vision she did not have prior to her release. Therefore, not all knowledge is physical knowledge.

    Implications

    Whether Mary learns something new upon experiencing color has two major implications: the existence of qualia and the knowledge argument against physicalism.

    First, if Mary does learn something new, it shows that qualia (the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences) exist. If Mary gains something after she leaves the room — if she acquires knowledge of a particular thing that she did not possess before — then that knowledge, is knowledge of the qualia of seeing red. Therefore, it must be conceded that qualia are real properties, since there is a difference between a person who has access to a particular quale and one who does not.


    Second, if Mary does learn something new upon experiencing color, physicalism is false. Specifically, the Knowledge Argument is an attack on the physicalist claim about the completeness of physical explanations of mental states. Mary may know everything about the science of color perception, but can she know what the experience of red is like if she has never seen red? She has learned something new, via experience, and hence, physicalism is false.
     
  6. Cybermancer

    Cybermancer Don Quixote

    Messages:
    13,795
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    BFG GTX260OC (192 SP)
    source: http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia-knowledge/#6

    Doesn't this support my earlier post that we can not prove or confute that someone has consciousness or not? Even if it's AGI?
     
  7. Makalu

    Makalu Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,196
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    EVGA 8800 Ultra
    yeah I didn't dispute that...it just means that they're trying to model something in humans that they can't even prove exists and have no way of knowing if they'll ever succeed....so they just work on mimicing what things they can. I reckon when a robot strums a harmonic tempo of it's emotions on it's sound chip and another robot says "don't give up your day job" they'll be on to something ;)
     
  8. DSK

    DSK Banned

    Messages:
    17,914
    Likes Received:
    1
    GPU:
    HD5770/BenQ G2220HD
    ......hmmm this is confusing :wanker:
     
  9. Cybermancer

    Cybermancer Don Quixote

    Messages:
    13,795
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    BFG GTX260OC (192 SP)
    I absolutely agree with you, Makalu, but shouldn't we nevertheless keep trying? Isn't that what we are about? Exploring and inventing new things? Be creative? As I posted earlier already: just because something isn't invented/proven/etc. today doesn't mean it still won't be tomorrow.

    [​IMG]
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  10. dsbig

    dsbig Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,108
    Likes Received:
    67
    GPU:
    Nvidia 4070
    oops wrong post
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009

  11. Makalu

    Makalu Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,196
    Likes Received:
    2
    GPU:
    EVGA 8800 Ultra
    well I'm sure that AI research will continue in areas that can continue to get funding and some success and useful applications will be gained. I think the field of Strong AI will hit a dead end at some point much like the field of Expert Systems did when they found that the computers are just too rigid to simulate a human experts adaptability, flexibility, innovation, creativity and common sense when confronted with all the variables and changing conditions and exceptions to the rules that most real world problems present.

    When they find out/admit that instinct, intuition, emotion, attitudes, images, hormones and "common sense" are a far bigger part and play a more powerful role in the realm of human intellect than the mechanical rules of logic and reason then maybe they'll come up with a new approach...
     
  12. bokah

    bokah Guest

    Messages:
    2,316
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    EVGA 670GTX 2G
    sorry did not read all this...

    ive been dreaming of cpu that process spectrum instead of 1/0, since 1990's
    imho 1/0 is what preventing us to get to "next level"
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  13. Cybermancer

    Cybermancer Don Quixote

    Messages:
    13,795
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    BFG GTX260OC (192 SP)
    You can simulate analog systems on a digital one, though, bokah.
     
  14. bokah

    bokah Guest

    Messages:
    2,316
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    EVGA 670GTX 2G
    what i was trying to say... we are stuck on binary (base-2) system, we could and should go for base-∞, even base-3 or base-10 would be progress
     
    Last edited: Nov 9, 2009
  15. allesclar

    allesclar Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    5,769
    Likes Received:
    176
    GPU:
    GeForce GTX 1070
    +1 completely agree, but its money and investment. Something that they aint willing to do just yet.
     

  16. JohnMaclane

    JohnMaclane Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,822
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    8800GTS 640mb
    ?
    Weather its binary or whatever it doesn't make a difference right?
    Binary can be expressed as a dec (base 10), hex (base 16) etc etc, the binary units are just numerical representations of transistor states, even though today we say that we use more states.
     
  17. Dustpuppy

    Dustpuppy Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,146
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    integrated - fffffffuuuuu


    Wait what? I am under the impression expert systems is alive and kicking. It's being combined with NLP to troll through the internet and digital documents to create massive databases. Expert systems aren't designed to solve problems like an expert can, rather they're designed to know the proper facts in response to the proper question. If a problem has been solved the solution may be stored in the system, but otherwise they don't attempt it.

    If you want to know the morphology of an amoeba an expert system can help you, if you want it to design a spring for you then that's a different problem.

    Anyway, from what I've seen expert systems are really just* language processing problems. It's hard to design the thing such that the right output comes out for the right input quickly.

    *not to imply they're easy, they're harder than hell to program
     
  18. Cybermancer

    Cybermancer Don Quixote

    Messages:
    13,795
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    BFG GTX260OC (192 SP)
  19. bokah

    bokah Guest

    Messages:
    2,316
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    EVGA 670GTX 2G
    that was back in 2000 ;) binary is just as is states of electricity and it was hard to handle more than 2 states

    with base-infinity computing u could count one single picture of universe as one bit and next moment u get second bit, beats binary 1-0 to me

    if cpu could compute spectrum that would be something to achieve
     
  20. Dustpuppy

    Dustpuppy Ancient Guru

    Messages:
    4,146
    Likes Received:
    0
    GPU:
    integrated - fffffffuuuuu
    good luck cybermancer :p
     

Share This Page