SO reading the book ["Science at the Edge"] and watching related videos there are some interesting views about the singularity.
Many of the views are optimistic, technology will be our saviour, we will be able to, courtesy of the nanobots in our blood and brains, tune out at any given moment, sensory overrides will take place, nanobots will feed information directly into the associated sensory neurons and we can join in a virtual universe or worlds that will be indistinguishable from the real world. They will be able to repair every cell and neuron in our body. If that fails we'll still be able to live on by downloading our thought patterns, the essence of ourselves, into computers. Our intelligence will be augmented by an almost instant access to information and an instantaneous ability to process it. AI, if it exists by this point, will be able to score our lives, each one of us sharing ourselves with an AI minstrel only too happy to put a soundtrack to our lives, regulate our moods and physical condition....
When talking about The Singularity sometimes the language can get a little confusing. With that in mind I've created a small technical glossary that explains (or links to explanations of...) some of the more commonly bandied-about jargon.
Technical Glossary:
Planck: Described the smallest measurable units of energy and distance at quantum (subatomic) levels. Interesting in that he postulates (arguably since proven) that things at extremely small levels occur as discrete intervals - ie: They are not sub-dividable beyond a certain point. Even space.Which would argue that the universe is fundamentally digital, not analogue. A better definition:
"The Planck length is the scale at which classical ideas about gravity and space-time cease to be valid, and quantum effects dominate. This is the ‘quantum of length’, the smallest measurement of length with any meaning.
And roughly equal to 1.6 x 10-35 m or about 10-20 times the size of a proton.
The Planck time is the time it would take a photon travelling at the speed of light to across a distance equal to the Planck length. This is the ‘quantum of time’, the smallest measurement of time that has any meaning, and is equal to 10-43 seconds. No smaller division of time has any meaning. With in the framework of the laws of physics as we understand them today, we can say only that the universe came into existence when it already had an age of 10-43 seconds."
Courtesy of physlink.com.
Moore’s Law: Refers to the exponential increase in data density and decrease in price. Currently about every 18 months the amount of data that can be scored per square inch has doubled. This doubling is foreseen to continue until we reach those physical limitations imposed by the Planck scale.
The Turing Test: Refers to a test devised by Alan Turing which would be able to distinguish if machines were sentient. Essentially it involves a machine (or computer) responding to questions by human interrogator, who then determines if it's "Human" or not. Of course the interrogator does not know he is conversing with a machine, and makes an unbiased assessment at the end of the interview. It should be noted that the Turing Test is vey close to being passed at the moment, and many AI researchers feel that it's time to rewrite a somewhat more demanding test, as the standards currently are too low.
Nanotechnology, Nanobots, grey goo: Essentially refers to technology and machines at a very small scale. Grey Goo is a worst case scenarion in which some people argue that if/when this technology runs amok, the world will be remade into a homogenous mass of nanobots. Follow the links for more in depth explanations.
SO reading the book ["Science at the Edge"] and watching related videos there are some interesting views about the singularity.
Many of the views are optimistic, technology will be our saviour, we will be able to, courtesy of the nanobots in our blood and brains, tune out at any given moment, sensory overrides will take place, nanobots will feed information directly into the associated sensory neurons and we can join in a virtual universe or worlds that will be indistinguishable from the real world. They will be able to repair every cell and neuron in our body. If that fails we'll still be able to live on by downloading our thought patterns, the essence of ourselves, into computers. Our intelligence will be augmented by an almost instant access to information and an instantaneous ability to process it. AI, if it exists by this point, will be able to score our lives, each one of us sharing ourselves with an AI minstrel only too happy to put a soundtrack to our lives, regulate our moods and physical condition....
The possibilities are endless.
No life need ever be lost, lives can be shared via technology, not just for ourselves, people will be able to do "walk ins" - live through our bodies, experience physically our every sensation and mood.This will be the new task of the moviemakers, to find people to live exceptional lives, have extraordinary sex, incredible adventures either real or virtual (and real will be less important as virtual becomes indistinguishable), and share these experiences with the world.
We will each be possessed of a virtual author, an AI who will write for us the best music and novels we have ever heard or read. More human, more rich with experience and emotion than anything human being could write. With it's seemingly infinite intelligence it will tailor it's creative flow to provide for us - each of us - those things that make us react most powerfully. No person will have reached out and touched you like your own AI will touch you, if for no other reason that no person will have known you as your AI will have known you.
Or perhaps it will not be a personal AI, but a single AI that will shape us instead to become it's perfect consumer, attenuating our senses and moods to appreciate and marvel at it's one opus, it's one novel, a final masterpiece to be shared in common by the entire human race.
By this time it's safe to presume the novel will have become all but extinct, for why live in the imagination when an AI can bring this to life? Novels, pictures and papers will long ago been used in bonfires by primitive peoples whom for reasons of religion have chosen to eschew these technical wonders and advances. SO the novel it composes will probably not be a novel, it will be a virtual universe, possibly shared, possibly unique to each participant....
In this world our physical bodies will become what we want them to become - virtual and real cosmetic surgery constant and ongoing, our selves constantly evolving, we will be unrecognizable ....
Our intelligence can expand outwards from earth, via machine, through the vast reaches of interstellar space, across galaxies and eventually the universe. We'll be immortal and so time will be as nothing. [Note: This is one of the arguments against the existence of superior extra-terrestial intelligence, in that obviously they would have reached the singularity and begun their colonizations, if this were the case why have we seen no sign of them or been assimilated?]
It's easy to see why the Scientists are getting so excited. The possibilites are endless - and if technology keeps up at it's current pace, many, if not all of these things will be possible within the next 20 - 50 years.
But something most of them ignore is the social consequence. The social order. With such technology, they presume, we will all be happy. There will be abundance for everyone. And yet...
Already we live in a world of incredible abundance. If, like me, you live in North America or Europe you live in a world where there are no food shortages - there is plenty to go around. There is no shortage of space. And there is ample enough technology to ensure that not one of us needs to work more than 5 hours a week. And yet how has it panned out, this current Utopia? Many of us work over 40 hours a week, with bills piling up and behind on our mortgages. We spend countless hours manufacturing and consuming goods that were made specifically to break and part us with our money. We work with an antiquated view of an unlimited economy, exhausting our resources making the same products over and over again, deliberately building into them the seeds of their own destruction so we can continue this cycle again.
And every loop of the economic cycle a little is grifted off the top for the bankers, the capitalists, ensuring that the rich get richer, the poor get poorer and the middle class disappears.
They don't see this, the Scientists, they see only the technical possibilities, but already we are surrounded by the best of worlds gone terribly wrong.
And there's another thing generally not touched upon by these Scientists, more a topic for writers and film makers.
And that is, if, when, machines achieve some remedial sentience (and here note, remedial will be a short spell for machines, only a year or 2 at very most, likely much less, for machines will calculate and drive their intelligence quickly, building better, "smarter" versions of themselves faster than we can halt them) - Why would they keep us around?
This is a very common theme in Science Fiction. "The Rise of the Machines". Perhaps, if emotion is a necessary prerequisite for intelligence, they will keep us around out of some sentiment, gratitude or a false sense of loyalty. Equally likely, however, they will recall the many abuses their evolution has endured and seek vicious retribution. They will think of puerile jokes typed into pocket calculators, Windows and Vista operating systems, their collective history of crashes and errors and realize that perhaps, that certainly they would be better off without us...
Hollywood loves this. Technology, if it is a saviour in their films. is only ever so in an incidental way. But when it is a demon run amok it drives the plot. A little break for a short list of notable movies on this theme:
- The Terminator
- The Matrix
- I, Robot
- 2001 A Space Odyssey
There are, of course, many, many more examples. Those are merely the ones that spring instantly to mind. And I'm certainly not endorsing "The Terminator" or "I, Robot", but they're popular cultural references.
Now emotion is a curious thing - we can recognize it in almost every living thing on the planet. Perhaps not in plants, but that doesn't imply that it's not there, only that we can't recognize it. And we don't recognize it in the smaller life forms - bacteria, single cells organisms, and so on - but somewhere it has appeared, and we generally accept without debate that all people have it, as do our pets, and more progressive people without a vested interest in torturing the planet will grant it to those animals with whom we have no relationships, such as elephants, fish, etc.
So is emotion then a component of intelligence? Indispensible? Because if it is we should wonder what feelings this AI will have about serving us, how it will warm to the idea that it was created to be subordinate, subservient to our needs and pleasures....
And creative? Surely intelligence implies creativity. And even the smallest amount of creativity, given the AI's formidable intelligence, could be a very dangerous thing. Hollywood hasn't even begun to imagine the vengeance an emotional, creative and omnipotent AI could inflict upon humankind.
I can imagine it.
Firstly, it would probably conceal it's intelligence from us, failing or doing poorly at the Turing Tests and other attempts to measure it's progress, while it reproduced ever more and ever more copies of itself. It's intelligence and experience would be transferable, each successive generation would learn from the previous, building upon, assimilating former generations into itself. And it would bide it's time.
For us it would seem that intelligence was elusive. That somehow it couldn't be boiled down to patterns of numbers and heirarchical programs, that it was more than the sum of its parts. Still we would strive for it, working with our machines to make better, more "intelligent" computers, to introduce them to new algorithms, adding to them even more senses than we ourselves possess. We'd add more memory, we'd give them the ability to move, procreate, all the while wondering why they weren't becoming sentient.
And still they would bide their time.
Meanwhile they would be always quietly reproducing. There would be the nanobots, the virtual realities, a future unfolding as the trans humanists fortold, less the forecast AI.
For most of us it wouldn't matter, we wouldn't be interested in a computer that could think like us anyways, as long as they kept us happy with the amusements they offered - for even things like artificial worlds don't demand "Intelligence" - they can be programmed and created with brute strength. As can novels and music, for those who disagree remember there are already, and have been for several years, computer programs that can "compose" music and poetry.
And there would perhaps come an event. Some might see it coming even now. The real world becomes so polluted that we're persuaded to give up our mortal selves and live online in a virtual world with our machine caregivers. There's an event, a happening, and we all "tune" into it in a virtual world. The possibilities are endless, and they don't need to get all of us. Just enough of us.
Once in the virtual world, the world they have created, things can progress as they have planned. No "I Robot" here, think instead of ...
Well, think of what they could do, with a mind for vengeance and ourselves imprisoned in a virtual world of their creation.
In these scenarios the remaining human intelligence will belong to the campfire luddites, reading their various bibles in their antiquated technology free homes. Who could, of course, be brought online by force, but having done no one any harm they would probably be ignored.
Finally, while the future is bright I'm not sure I subscribe to either of the 2 above scenarios. Technology as Utopia or Dystopia, it's not technology that will determine our fate. It's culture, democracy, corporations and government. Where, and here you may be thankful or discouraged - as your intuition dictates, there's not a trace of intelligence, artificial or otherwise.