Yeah I'm with tripzip in that our brains aren't set-up to project what the singularity is going to embody. Medieval man couldn't grasp the renaissance, or philosophers during the enlightenment could never in a million years have pictured the industrial revolution. I mean, that's the scale of things we're talking about, right? Culture itself changes due to exponentially rapid advances in technology....
actually the singularity is gonna be even more different, faster, at least it's gonna be like a complete renaissance in a very short period of time (no idea how short, though).
also i don't think it's the brains that are the problem, it's the fact that we
defined the singularity as (-- looking at the wikipedia article, i cant find it anymore --), well i thought it was defined as "that point in time after which we cannot predict what culture will look like" [as caused by the more and more rapid onset of new technologies and/or paradigm shifts].
a real AI would most probably cause it to happen, but it does not have to be, in fact it's quite probable that it'll be something we can't possibly predict or expect today
But unless technology starts inventing itself, it will never advance "infinitely fast" - because there are a finite number of people working on it. The answer everyone leans on is to have AI start developing new tech... it seems logical, since computers are just gonna keep getting faster.
but this is the thing
the thing that i misunderstood at first, too, that caused me to dismiss the singularity theory as bullshit at first. everyone can reason and see that the speed of technological advance is an exponential curve, not a reciprocal, so it will NOT have an asymptote!
but this asymptote is not the point of the singularity.
(in fact the exponentialness of the speed increase is also not the point, if the increase (in speed) would be linear, it would also happen, only much, much later.)
as long as the technological advances ever increase in speed.
the point is that every technological advance changes the future in unpredictable ways. this implies that the speed of technological advance, especially the speed of paradigm shifts, puts a limiting factor on how far ahead we can possibly make a remote broad sketch of what society will look like.
now in naive theory, this predictive "fog of time" moves along with us, giving us a steady lookout on the way the world roughly looks the next, say, 20 years.
the only thing is that as the speed of changes seems to be increasing, this "fog of time" gets denser and denser, and the amount of time we can look forward shortens and shortens.
now the theory says--and i don't think this is very unlikely--that at a certain moment in time, our "predictive lookout" timespan will decrease to zero.
which means that, at that point in time,
nobody knows what is going to happen nextthat is the singularity.
maybe it'll just be a sort of collective global "huh?" followed by a shrug, and moving on
Another thing I want to "call in advance" is that this singularity has a lot of similar features to the apocalypse... it's big, it's scary, and it may just be an illusion. People seem certain that it's coming (all the data supports it!) and that the world is never gonna be the same. But to take a lesson from Talib (Black Swan), humans are actually pretty bad at projecting the future. The graph of the advancement of information (RAW's "Jumpin' Jesus" phenomenon) points at a sharp curve in the coming generation. But that curve doesn't take into account numerous unseen factors. Like, processor speed doubles every few years - but perhaps at a certain point processor speed stops mattering.
heh, you're right.
so what'll be first? some big catastrophal reset, or the singularity?
also processor speed might be doubling, but that will stop at some point. it'll go on for about a decade (maybe less, i forgot). but that doesn't matter, as the C64 demoscene has shown us, being stuck with a certain type of processor, given some time, you can still do amazing shit. we haven't even *really* used 10% of the possible computing power of today's computer chips.
but it doesn't matter, as long as they keep doubling in speed every 18 months.
for example, ever wonder why your computer gets slower when you use it for a longer time? like it's getting clogged? that's not supposed to happen. it shouldn't. but you can just get a new one, right? i see my computer going sluggishly at simple tasks like moving around windows or scrolling some times. come on, that's basic shit i programmed on a 486 and it moved at 70fps! but it happens to be this way because the software i'm running is expecting a faster computer than the one i have, so they didn't really optimize their scrolling and panning routines.
(but i digress)
