Transhumanism, superintelligence and a global change

I've been aware of this subject through science fiction writing and films for a while but not in such a coherant way and not realising that it was so far advanced.

I could spend a very long time explaining superintelligent AI's and the sigularity that is predicted at the outside 30 years but as soon as the first third of the next decade! However I'm not going to but I will add some links to some very intresting and maybe more lucidly written.

Reason to bother paying any intrest in this subject and following the links include :-
1. Finding out you might never die
2. Ever
3. End of war, money, evils of the world... maybe
4. You could imerse yourself in a self created world of your choice that would be just as real/more real than any lucid dream VR experience.
5. There are things you can do to help
6. It could happen as soon as the first 3rd of the next decade... 2012 anyone?

I listened to this programe yesterday
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/lawsoflife.shtml (you can listen via a replay link at the bottom). The progamme was very intresting about moores law "the exponential growth of computing power" etc.

After listening I did some research into the issues raised and found this article http://www.nickbostrom.com/ethics/ai.html by scientist Nick Bostrom of Oxford uni. http://www.nickbostrom.com

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/articles/whoaresingularityactivists.htm

The Singularity Institute http://singinst.org/ has been formed to bring about the Seed AI.

http://www.extropy.org/index.htm

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/science/smallworlds.shtml 3 programes to listen to about nano technology.
​

 

Hehe, but it all depends on whether or not we blow the earth up in the next few years...

 

It would be best not to blow the earth up. Billions of years from the birth of the universe then millions of years crawling out of the slime and evolving only to die in a nuclear destruction just a few years before we all could acheive imortality..... would seem to be a shame to say the least.

 

Indeed, though the way things are looking it would not suprise me...

 

Transhumanism is indeed a very promising philosophy for the coming decades...provided, as others have said, that we don't blow up the earth first.

I think 2012 is a little on the early side for superintelligence. Taking More's Law, and Kurzweil's Law of Accelerating Returns, into account, I'd be surprised if we achieved superintelligence before 2020 or later than 2040. The fastest supercomputers will be about as fast as the human brain by 2015, but software usually lags behind hardware by at least ten years. Frankly, our advances in software have been disappointing and IMO are the biggest impediment to AI. That's not to say that AI can't be achieved, just that it'll take a little longer.

The so-called "technological singularity" - the convergence of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer science into a discipline that advances so rapidly the scientists can't even keep up with it - probably will not occur until at least 2030.

 

My pessimism would stem more from goverment control, banning and moral and ethical popular opposition rather than technological factors. The hardware is capable of running a sub human speed mind (the software) today and Moores is predicted to be ahead of itself at least in the short term and a swathe of new technologies are poised in the transistor feild. As you say the software is an issue but if sections could be delt with an improved via computer self improvement progress would be made faster than I think you might imagine.... I hope.

I think there will be no singularity before the Seed AI comes into being, so dates hinge on that IMO.

 

Transhumaism/posthumanism/extropianism is cool...

I teeter between eager anticipation of the technological singularity, and just thinking that it's all too good to sound true. That's it's just "the rapture for geeks"...

And who is to say that the singularity would't be so chaotic as to be destructive? At least to *us*...

 

Why does one need artifical means to be imortal when one can find it within oneself which is the only ultimate truth of pure consiousness (God/Love or whatever label you may want)

Anything artifical would only cause pleasure and therefore pain. Are we not in a aritifical reality already within our own mentally created world?

 

I think most people would jump at the chance to not ever have to worry about disease, aging, or the other problems associated with a physical body, regardless of their belief in God or their personal philosophy.

Being "artificial" will catch on over time.

 

agree but it will still have its limitations and also its pains. The mind is not the totalility of oneself. The mind is one part of oneself and that is thought. Thought will just continue into another dimension but self will still have it's pains since all suffering comes from the self which is thought. When one meditates you can see thought in action and so awareness arises of thought which is seperate (or not seperate from thought) when one realises this perspective on life changes because the ego no longer keeps one trapped in the illusion of the self.

 

The Matrix. i never saw 2 or 3, but what you all describe is what I saw running amok in the movie. I don't buy into it, because it seems unlikely that our brains could devise something capable of surpassing it in intelligence. I may not be making sense but if we could create something more cunning than us, why wouldn't it take over?

 

Actually, the concept of the Matrix will be within our technological capabilities in 10-15 years. If you subtract the man-machine war element (which was necessary to sell the movie, but probably unlikely to actually happen), I don't see how an all-encompassing virtual reality could be anything less than a great thing for the world.

We're on track to doing so. Ray Kurzweil published a graph of our computer capabilities in his book The Age Of Spiritual Machines. He extrapolated the trends in the computer industry into the future (they've been remarkably accurate so far).

The human brain is capable of processing approximately 10^16 calculations per second. Currently $1,000 of computer hardware buys you about 10^10 calculations per second (somewhere between the brain of an insect and a mouse). By 2010, $1,000 will buy you 10^11 flops (a mouse brain), and by 2025 we should reach 10^16 flops (a human brain). If this trend continues into the distant future, $1,000 will buy you 10^26 flops (the entire human race's brain capacity) by 2060!

These figures are adjusted for inflation, and refer only to the hardware. The "software" of intelligence will most likely take a little longer (5-10 years) to achieve.

It almost certainly will take over, but probably not in a malicious way. The most likely scenario isn't one of human enslavement, nor is it one of machines running our world leaving us with nothing to do. I think the most likely scenario is the blurring of the line between "man" and "machine." Is an entity with neural implants a "man" or a "machine"? How about an entity with electronic circuitry that prefers to walk around in a biological body? Legal questions like these will probably become more common in a couple decades.

The prospects of machines (or even of humans v2.0) running the world may seem a little disconcerting, but there's really no way to stop it short of a civilization-ending disaster.

 

the next pending singularity is the regular ol' pole shift , but since we're not at all prepared for it by cultural memory , it's pretty much unencountered as an experience - a singularity . what happens when a complex brain runs backwards ? it could be good in some respect , of new configurations , revelations . some people will do better than others because surely the linear thinkers will go mad . children will be ok . their thinking is just the same forward or back quite like associative equations , eh ?

today's magnetic field is in a state of flux worth watching . mars used to have one , now it ain't there . life may not exist without one . ours is now in a motion that is the pre-amble to a major shift - it is soon . it'll flop and flip . the history of this sort of event can be viewed in iron deposits . elements shift alignment .

life , too , is of elements , and the elemental effects on thought can be profound . the exotic chemical thought-life of practicing hippies might also turn out to be good and useful in surviving - well - most any singularity .

 

the hardware is not the issue i dont think

the issue is this: we cannot create artificial intelligence before we even know everything about real intelligence!

we dont know enough about the human brain to create the software.

emotions and ego are hugely complex yet very simple at teh same time. the actual processes going on are simple, as are the basic feelings felt on the mind. however, the way all these are put together, the 'ego' part, the result of our brain, this is the complex thing. oh and recognition. the human brain can recognise letters of many many types of handwriting. for a computer to do this, it would require so much incredibly detailed code.

the easiest way to create artificial intelligence would be to completely map out the functions of the brain. because until then, we would be trying to descover the mind from scratch, in the terms of the very result of itself. that might have been confusing, but think of it as being subjective programming unless its modelled on the science of the brain. this is a fuckload harder to code than trying to replicate a known-sequence/structure

 

Understatement of the Year award goes to.... Pantalimon! *applause*

 

You're right. Fortunately, we humans are making almost as much progress in neurology and psychology as we are in computer technology. By the time we have the "hardware" capabilities of the human brain, we shouldn't be that far away from at least a basic understanding of intelligence, sufficient to help us create something as smart as we are.

I don't anticipate more than a 5-10 year gap between having the "hardware" capabilities of the human brain and having the "software" capabilities of the human brain.