Imagine a silicon brain that we create that is 10% more capable than our brain. It's nothing astounding, but it's smarter. And it has access to all knowledge within seconds. So this brain is able to actively comb through that information, and look at it's own design, and being 10% smarter, it's able to design a more efficient AI. That AI, now X% smarter will be able to do the same, etc, etc... It's not unlike what we do now. You couldn't design and build a modern computer without a modern computer. But the AI will be able to do it better, and faster. So it's not about a potential advancement that changes the world a little. It's about the possibility of being able to jump human knowledge by years or even centuries in a very short period of time.
You are missing a fundamental key difference. There is no profit in reaching the stars. Besides that, there are also no barriers that come close to the issues with the Physics and energy requirements of space travel. Unlike a warp drive which we don't even know is possible, the human brain is an actual physical device that exists, and simply uses chemicals as it's logic gates and transistors. We both run on electricity.
I'm a biologist by schooling, and a programmer by occupation. So I understand the science on both sides, and it's not a matter of if, it's a matter of when. And it's coming a lot sooner than people think.
This is an indicator you hardly understan the science behind it. We barely have any understanding how brain works, so even if singularity is possible it is very very far away.
Broad understanding of how the brain functions it not necessary (and would not be sufficient) to replicate it. To make a model of a brain that runs on a computer, we only need to be able to replicate it's basic building blocks, and then copy the structure of a brain over.
The basic technologies to do this already exist, and are presently used to reverse engineer microchips (among other things). What you do is first freeze a brain, and then carefully slice a few micrometers off the top. Then record all the connections between neurons in the top layer. Slice another layer off and continue.
This would take a very long time, and cost hundreds of billions. It would not, however, require any advancement in technology over our present level. The key technology we presently lack is a computing substrate sufficient to run the simulated brain.
That's one approach, but I don't think there's any evidence that you would end up with a working brain at the end, let alone a copy of the individual you started with. And good luck finding a volunteer. :)
The brain's functionality is not just due to the physical connections between neurons, it's the chemical and electrical connections as well, operating on various simultaneous levels (that is, the frequency of firing as well as the strength of firing of neurons matters). A frozen brain isn't working, and you need to copy all that stuff too, and the technology to do that doesn't exist. We can barely measure it, let alone reproduce it.
I don't think you can say that a thorough understanding of all those multiple levels of complexity in the brain just isn't necessary. I really don't think it is that easy.
Someone might have said the same thing about molecular biology before watson+crick. Neuroscience has been growing with leaps and bounds in the past decade, and, exactly because it is still in its infancy there are very significant low hanging fruit to be discovered as visualization and stimulation techniques are improving and are employed to scale. It actually does look like we will be able to figure out how our brain works in a decade (decades?). Once that is figured out, we already have the computer framework to do massive simulations of the brain.
Allen himself is funding a Brain research institute, so one wonders why he's pessimistic about the future of neuroscience.
How we work is completely irrelevant to reaching a singularity. These arguments are like talking about how we will need only a few computers as large as cities to handle our needs or the making of OS/2 out of intel assembly.
When we have a github of standardized computations and deep learning (or evolutionary) algorithms that pull it together with no human intervention we will have the singularity. Then it can try to figure us out or do something useful instead.
It wont look magical, it wont take a huge market force, it wont answer your religious questions or guess what you are thinking... But it will change how we approach and automate solutions to what are currently intellectual problems. Reality is always mundane.
Well, that statement was a lot more correct even just a few years ago. But we're starting to get a much better grasp on it. In the past 10 years or so we have learned more about how the brain functions than in all of human history. It's true, we're not yet experts, but you're making the assumption that we need to know entirely how the human brain works in order to build something that supersedes it in capability, and this is simply untrue. I don't need to know anything about how a gasoline engine works to build a faster and more efficient electrical engine. In truth, such thinking may even impinge on my ability to do so. The singularity isn't about creating a human brain in chips, it's about a point when the chips are able to process more than our brains are capable. What forms that takes and consequence of that is simply unforeseeable. Simple math proves it's coming.
I'm sorry, I mean no disrepect, but the idea that because you are a programmer by occupation doesn't really mean you understand what it would take bring about the sort of rapture predicted by Kurzweil.
Last night I read several posts on HN about people calling themselves "hackers" or "programmers" because they played with Wordpress and learned a little Javascript on a YouTube. This is not to be elitist but I think claiming expertise on this topic requires a little more insight than what is passing for being a "programmer" these days.
And you're somewhat wrong, I think. There is no reason inherently that traveling "to the stars" has to be unprofitable. In fact, many of those predictions about colonization the parent discussed, usually had some sort of capitalist profit driven motive. The pace of "accelerating progress" could manifest a cheap means of such travel. I don't know that speculative physics about faster than light travel (warping space-time, etc) is any more unrealistic than some of these prognostications about AI and spiritual transcendence, whatever that is.
But honestly, responding to this post sort of reminds of responding to Way of the Master type people anyway. :)
And it's not just a matter of profit. In fact, the research for the achievement of superhuman intelligence must hijack the ordo cognoscendi and jump in front of the line, because with superhuman intelligence humans can leave the rest of science to machines (hopefully).
There's stupendous profit in every small incremental step towards it. AI research in general has proven to be unbelievably profitable -- even when you fail in your goals (like most AI research to date), every minor partial result can probably be turned into a multimillion business.
Before the AI winter, there was a lot of criticism of how the US govt spent a lot of money on a lot of projects which fizzled out. One of the results built from the ashes of those DARPA projects was the Dynamic Analysis and Replanning Tool, used to optimize and schedule transportation of supplies and personnel.
From wikipedia: Introduced in 1991, DART had by 1995 offset the monetary equivalent of all funds DARPA had channeled into AI research for the previous 30 years combined.
Imagine having a computer that would have the same level of cognition as a human. I think most people would disagree with you on that not being valuable.
True if everybody has access to strong AI. I doubt that is the way it will play out. At least at the beginning. Whomever invents it first will probably hoard it for themselves as an advantage against everybody else. The technology will eventually spread to everybody else but by that time our economy will probably have adapted.
You're a little unclear as to why it's called the singularity. It means a point so drastically different that we cannot predict what the world will look like after it happens. However, should a planet still exist on the day after this occurs, you can pretty much guarantee that the company that controls this technology will make Apple, Google, and Microsoft look like technological infants. Well, unless it is Google, which seems to be the play they are making by hiring RK.
Also, World of Warcraft is virtualized, and everything in that game is potentially infinitely abundant. And yet, it still seems to pull in billions. So...
Yes, but my point is essentially that talking about profits in a post singularity world is probably as sensible as talking about Mao as CEO of China. After the singularity we will likely have a different socio-economic system and profits will probably be something like a noble rank is today.
I get the new iMac this week, and I'm taking my current windows machine and turning it into a homebrew Steambox tomorrow. I'm using an Ikea dresser thing http://www.ikea.com/ca/en/catalog/products/90179927/#/601799... as the box (with the top drawer for the console games), though I'm a little concerned with the airflow... The current case is probably overkill with the 6 fans, but I can only cut out two holes in the drawer before I'm worried about loosing structural integrity, it's particle board after all. Add the power supply and drive mounts (I want both windows 7 and Linux), and there isn't any more space. Oh well, I guess I'll find out soon enough. As much as I love the hacking, it would be nice to have something prebuilt so I'm not completely screwed if I turn this into a smokebox instead of a steambox.
A cool idea might be putting a push/pull fan setup for the drawers themselves. Cut 4x12cm holes in the top 2 on either sides, get grills and mount them underneath. You might have to cut out the drawer it's self to open and close but the grills will add a cool look and maybe even mount the fan control knobs somewhere so you can make adjustments and even turn on/off LEDs mounted on the fan it's self. Put the system in the drawer without a case of any kind, particle board doesn't conduct but you could just get a non conductive mat to put under it.
Hmm, some purebred dogs yes. They can have quite awful lives because of genetic diseases. But domestication, besides the fact it was done by our pre-human ancestors, is not the same. Modern thinking sees the domestication of dogs more as a co-evolution of humans and dogs.
Dogs can function quite well in their natural environment (in close proximity to humans); white Bengal tigers will die very, very quickly in the wild. The mutation is non-adaptive.
You mean like cats? (That's not a rhetorical question, by the way. When you domesticate tigers, would they be very different from what we now consider a cat?)
That's sort of the process we had to get the bengal (hybrid asian leopard cat and housecat), which is considered a domestic cat after 4 generations.
Same thing has been done with servals ("savannah cat"); I can only imagine how awesome/terrifying it would be with other lesser wild cats, although I think there are enough differences between the great cats and domestic cats to make it difficult/impossible to do naturally (tiger/cat or leopard/cat cross).
Didn't Siegfried and Roy hack the maternal instinct of female cats to achieve some semblance of domestication? I mean, it didn't work out very well of course, because a cat mauled Roy and nearly killed him by grabbing him by the neck (to drag him to safety, according to them) like she would a cub.
So, I think there is a hook. It's just a really shitty one. Note that the hook for dogs can backfire as well, if they try to assert pack dominance vs. their owner. So we breed really submissive dogs.
Tigers and especially lions are somewhat easy, not to domesticate per se but to befriend. I wouldn't really call this a hack the way domesticating dogs was a hack--they just seem willing to occasionally befriend humans the same way ordinary cats do.
Tigers and lions are very confident apex predators, so they don't really have the vicious instinct or the intense fear response that some animals have. So they don't deliberately attack humans. By contrast, leopards and jaguars will kill you out of sheer viciousness, bears will attack you if they feel threatened, and polar bears will attack you because they are hungry and you are made of meat.
The main danger with tigers and lions is that they don't really understand how fragile humans are, so they might accidentally kill or maim you, which happened to Roy.
Well, no, it's Fair Use. It's a legal defense, but since a news site would be hosting their own content, and editorializing, they would be be able to claim safe harbor. So a DMCA takedown would be effectively ignores, and followed up in the courts. Regardless, it's text book fair use. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use
How would you make that case? There are plenty of restrictions on free speech as well as freedom of the press, which is far from absolute, and is most certainly regulated.
True, but a restriction on printing the names of criminals and victims would be considered a "content-based restriction," which are subject to strict scrutiny.
There is an established legal basis for allowing publication of victim's names: "Thus, it is ordinarily unconstitutional for a state to proscribe a newspaper from publishing the name of a rape victim, lawfully obtained. This is because there ordinarily is no compelling governmental interest in protecting a rape victim’s privacy" (4). IANAL, but permission to print criminal's names (which are obtained legally) follows from similar logic.
"Ordinarily" also implies that it's subject to change. There's nothing inherent in the law that prevents the change being discussed, other than the status quo.
Because of the whole elitest nature of svblte, I actively go out of my way to ignore it. When the 'cool kid' in school doesn't want you to be in his group, you don't mimic him and try to be like him. You say fuck 'em, I'm going to do my own thing.
While I understand the sentiment; I do. Svbtle is nothing more than a network of blogs by various authors that one man (dcurtis) thinks have good substance. Your argument is roughly equivalent to me saying I'm starting my own newspaper because the Chicago Tribune won't print my article and wasting my time being all angry about it. Not worth it.
