Hmmm. Kinda fly's right over the many, many correct technological predictions that Kurzweil has made over the years...and comparing singulitarians to scientologists is rather absurd I think.
Any of those you want to describe in detail? Reading Kurzweil’d actual books felt rather like finding out the emperor has no clothes, to me: he made a lot of false analogies, conflated massively different things so he could argue for exponential growth, and made predictions so vague that he resembled a fortune teller more than a technologist.
The validity of arguments for/against the singularity are distinct from whether Kurzweil is a bullshit artist, of course.
I mean random chance means some of his predictions came true, some of them insightful, but a lot of the stuff on this list [0] is wayyy off the mark. "Average life expectancy is over 100 :P
I know a Scientologist and a former government employee who started a new techno-religion decades ago. It kind of operates as a conspiracy directed against the US Government.
The CIA has declassified documents where they suspect certain people known to them may had been Scientology agents; specifically the remote viewing psychic Pat Price who died under mysterious circumstances.
These members of this esoteric deep state worked with Pat Price at the CIA in the 1960s. [0] Thus they've held the highest security clearances for decades and several are current CIA contractors. [1]
Although it appears sinister, it's more like an optical illusion. Most of them are just scientists who have a legitimate interest in the unknown. Yet somewhere there is some grand secret with a subtle or covert force at work. Deciphering it is almost impossible though.
This techno-religion is affiliated with several former military and CIA employees. The US Government views it as a long-term, persistence kind of 'paranormal deep state' conspiracy which threatens national security. And, of course, the government considers their claims regarding remarkable secrets held by the government and exotic technology as false. (And they are false.)
One person involved in this is a Stanford professor who was recently in the NY Times discussing exotic and controversial research. His partner is the one who said (in the 1980s) that he was starting a new religion with the Scientology scientist; and ostensibly these people either have or are on the direct peripheral of "Singularity-type" radical technology.
Yet the only person affiliated with the group who actually works for the US Government is a JASON scientist. Some say he is the mastermind of it all but that's unlikely. JASON's an interesting group of elite scientists who meet once a year to work on various problems and topics for the federal government.
My point is there's interesting conspiracy-like actions happening, whether they are self-organizing and random, or some cosmic force of deception. If you think of the Stoic's idea of Amor Fati, then a first principle like 'deception is a force of nature' makes a lot of practical sense.
Resist the temptation to get angry, have faith in chaos and unlock mysteries of life.
Hits the nail on the head.
Kurzweil now works for Google
and the whole industry -- Google, Facebook, Microsoft ...
loves AI
The singularity is complete bullshit
created by a highly decorated scientist/inventor.
There is so much projection involved in predicting it
that only someone who is completely brainwashed would buy into it.
However, the idea fits in so well with the grwoth trajectory of the IT industry that the people who move the industry are completely in support of it.
It is wishful thinking though
and it serves to glorify the achievements of the IT industry
way beyond where reality stands.
> Because they believe that they have arrived at their beliefs scientifically, anyone who disputes their ludicrous conclusions must be irrational.
So they don't understand science at all but claim to use it. Typical. Singularitarians are a new version of scientologists which are a new version of mormons which are a new version of protestants or siekhs which are a new version of ... You get the point. Different details, same dumb stupidity and desire to control, use, and take advantage of others. It's just interesting to see such groups at different stages of their development and how the wider society around them responds. Typically there seems to be more acceptance as these religions get older, which is hardly surprising given humans' proclivity towards blind tradition following even when such blind following is dangerous. Humans have a hard time being skeptical of even the dumbest ideas if they are codified in tradition and this is something that such religions rely on to become established over time. Such religions usually survive in the long term if they can make it past a generation or a few decades and establish themselves as tradition, something singularitarianism is struggling heavily with currently. Fascinating to see how illogical ideas and systems of control like these religions come about.
They do ban and I can't think of a too much more appropriate site.
Their reporting is generally on par with lying.
I won't read their stuff because of ad clicks. So it might be a good article just like Fox does some good stuff, but I have read hundreds of their articles and fool me once....
I actually think that the “singularity” in the broad sense that there will come a time in the next century or so where technology will develop too fast for human beings to keep up with it without radical changes to our way of life is almost a foregone conclusion, I don’t see how you can look at the past century and not think there will be radical changes ahead of us. It’s the idea that these changes will be necessarily positive, or that they will lead to the benefits that Kurzweil et al so desperately want, that is largely wishful thinking. The future will be beautiful and horrible in equal measure, and expect that while some things will get better, some things will get much, much worse.
I agree. I think an economic singularity should be a given, based on the fact that all economic ROI is at least exponential (pe^(rt)) and has consistently performed exponentially for over 100 years.
The notion that this will mean a happiness singularity, complete freedom of choice for everyone, or even human survival are up for debate.
Exponential curves have a tendency to turn into S-curves when fundamental limits are reached. Aircraft might be the most obvious example. Moore's law is looking that way as well.
We can expect this to be true of other business models as well; the question is where the limits are.
I was hoping to see some well-cited figures and facts supporting the author's viewpoint, but instead was greeted by a cacophony of hyperbolic, smugly-worded, opinionated ranting of an ad hominem nature. Not sure why people on Hacker News would buy this noise. I can understand that there are arguments against the Singularity, but this ain't it.
This article is lazy, superficial mockery. (So, it's totally on-brand for the modern Salon.)
* Knocks Vinge as having "lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas" – as if he'd tried, and failed, instead of just been a successful professor & award-winning SF author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge)
* Sneers at Kurzweil as if he's one-act Singularity huckster – when in fact his notoriety stems from a long, successful career as a inventor/technologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil). The exponentialism is an important part of his later writing & speaking, and perhaps a motivating/unifying theme for his other work and overall optimism, but hardly the whole Kurzweil.
A funny thing about Kurzweil is despite the far-out nature of his projections & predictions & prescriptions, in his tone and presentation, he's still really understated – a mild-mannered professor making interesting observations.
If there's even an outside chance he's right, he (or someone else) would be justified with a far more emphatic, 'evangelical', alarm-raising presentation. "Big changes are coming, we'd better get ready!"
that seems to suggest someone else other than us is creating thise changes and they are going to catch us unawares.
The rate at which change happens in technology is painstakingly slow. Each rev of a product typically takes a year. Scientific research typically takes even longer.
At such a slow rate of change its hard to imagine something is going to hit us in the face before we know it.
Instead, it's more likely we'll chart a slow path towards the future. Slow enough that even somehting like the singularity, if it were to happen would occur over an extended period of time which would mean it would no longer be a singularity but a far more gradual change.
The Singularity is a logical result of mixing fear of death with atheism and love of technological progress. There's nothing to suggest infinite life extension is impossible, but there's also nothing to suggest humans are capable of developing it.
This article comes off too strong, but it's welcomed conversation.
My take: Kurzweil is missing the mark to suggest unabated growth in computing or anything like a true "singularity" where a curve goes to infinity. However, I think his overall insight into exponential effects and how unintuitive they are is brilliant and basically true. All of us who have been around for a few decades can clearly see the world changing dramatically in some dimensions, and the general expectation is that it will continue to do so. Some of the developments this century will probably be quite mind bending.
Kurzweil is definitely a strong optimist, and my feeling is he's a bit too optimistic, but I suspect that he may be right in the rough sense that the technologies discovered this century will help more than they hurt.
The commentary on the religiosity of technology is an interesting one, deserving more thought.
Have to agree that this seems like a lot of name-calling and rhetorical suppressive fire which fails to address any actual arguments.
Giving the devil his due, Kurzweil has been proved wrong on almost every single prediction he's made up to the current day--at least from my reading of his 'Singularity' book. Mostly as a consequence of the bottom falling out of Moore's Law.
But like most articles addressing the singularity thesis, the author completely fails to understand it even in the most rudimentary way. The singularity hypothesis depends on several plausible but not guaranteed steps of cause and effect; the author could have discussed anyone, and, as other commenters have mentioned, there are valid reasons to think the singularity highly unlikely. But like so many bloggers, their thought process only went as far as 'sounds weird to me personally--must be a religion!'
More generally, it's both lazy and extremely dangerous to dismiss an idea simply because it seems unusual to you. This is called the Absurdity Bias, and is fairly well demonstrated.
Just for example, there are comments in this thread saying that while some of the radical predictions of technologists are possible, there's 'also nothing to suggest humans are capable of developing it.' Sounds a lot like something Lord Byron would have said about antibiotics or powered flight a few years back.
I saw the Paypal CEO give Rutgers commencement today. He talked about how in 10-15 years the world will be entirely different because of AI and computers with trillions of transistors. He didn't mention how it would be different though.
I struggle to see how life could really be so different. I haven't read of any concrete examples of how faster computers will lead to a singularity. Wealth will change hands and economic inequality will continue to increase, but that's about it. Maybe it'll be different if research in genetics, nanotech, and energy are driven by advanced algorithms. There's still a lot we don't know about the human brain.
I lost a good friend to the Kurzweil cult. They genuinely dropped everything to join a "think tank" about how to handle the imminent singularity. They simply could not process the fact that Kurzweil's empirical claims are juvenile fantasy at best, outright willfully ignorant at worst, nor could they deal with the idea that it is meaningless to create elaborate closed-system logical deductions in a fundamentally open world.
For context, I have a background in neuroscience and computer science... the claims about brain modeling are particularly ferociously ignorant in an era when we don't even have the foggiest macroscopic clue about the neurobiological mechanisms that enable reasoning, and in which fundamental neuroscience hasn't evolved substantially at any level above protein expression pathways in the last 25 years.
If you have a thick illusion of understanding regarding how the brain works, don't feel alone - it plagued professionals in neuroscience for the 40-50 years who felt that the big breakthrough in unifying AI, systems neuroscience, and neurobiology must be right around the corner. Every new decade just deepens how crude these original notions were, and how blatantly false our estimates of our knowledge were.
The singularity is not near. It wasn't near in 2000, it won't be near in 2100, and my guess would be that it will never be near, in the same way the end times in Revelations won't be near anytime soon.
Frankly I'm happy to have people around who care about preventing improbable catastrophes, but biological and nuclear warfare, running out of water, collision with a sufficiently destructive meteor, a freak volcanic eruption off the known charts... even for the love of god encountering hostile extraterrestrials (? why not) are higher on the likely threat list in my head.
I think the attraction lies mostly in the fact that the argument avoids the "nasty bits" of reality that make real systems hard. Epidemiology, for example, has a lot to say about preventing the spread of humanity threatening diseases. But the truth is in the gritty details, not in high flown logical deductions.
I doubt that singularitarians, or singularitarianism even exists. The idea that it’s somehow the agenda of the SV rich and powerful is a ludicrous straw man.
There are of course quite a few crazies among singularitarians, however some are not. On the other hand, almost all critiques of the singularity are squarely in the "they have to be wrong, or I would need to sit down and read a book" genre, case in point, this article. Clearly the author did not bother to read The Singularity is Near, otherwise they would have noted that the entire argument is carefully crafted to subvert the critique that singularitarians need to hit a specific roadmap.
> Like many creative types, Vinge lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas.
Um, what? He is a successful CS professor, and beloved hard SF author. Anyone should be happy to be as successful as he is.
At any rate, the singularity is coming, wether we like it out not.
My main argument is: look at Intel Corp.
Intel is emblematic of the entire semiconductor industry. Like with how much they have struggled with the recent process nodes. And look at the industry roadmap, there are only a few nodes left for any kind of silicon lithography.
What is the tech sector going to do when there are no gains to be had with making chips cheaper and higher performance? Do you think Intel's investors are going to be OK if they say they can't make chips and better than they currently are? The stock price will crash, board members and executives will be fired, to be replaced by people promising a return to growth.
Is there a way forward for Intel? Yes, several, falling under the broad category called molecular nanotechnology, which is all about building machines with atomic scale precision. This will allow Intel to build faster chips, but will also be a revolution in other areas too. And then we can reasonable talk about things like biological immortality.
26 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 67.9 ms ] threadThe validity of arguments for/against the singularity are distinct from whether Kurzweil is a bullshit artist, of course.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictions_made_by_Ray_Kurzwe...
The CIA has declassified documents where they suspect certain people known to them may had been Scientology agents; specifically the remote viewing psychic Pat Price who died under mysterious circumstances.
These members of this esoteric deep state worked with Pat Price at the CIA in the 1960s. [0] Thus they've held the highest security clearances for decades and several are current CIA contractors. [1]
Although it appears sinister, it's more like an optical illusion. Most of them are just scientists who have a legitimate interest in the unknown. Yet somewhere there is some grand secret with a subtle or covert force at work. Deciphering it is almost impossible though.
This techno-religion is affiliated with several former military and CIA employees. The US Government views it as a long-term, persistence kind of 'paranormal deep state' conspiracy which threatens national security. And, of course, the government considers their claims regarding remarkable secrets held by the government and exotic technology as false. (And they are false.)
One person involved in this is a Stanford professor who was recently in the NY Times discussing exotic and controversial research. His partner is the one who said (in the 1980s) that he was starting a new religion with the Scientology scientist; and ostensibly these people either have or are on the direct peripheral of "Singularity-type" radical technology.
Yet the only person affiliated with the group who actually works for the US Government is a JASON scientist. Some say he is the mastermind of it all but that's unlikely. JASON's an interesting group of elite scientists who meet once a year to work on various problems and topics for the federal government.
My point is there's interesting conspiracy-like actions happening, whether they are self-organizing and random, or some cosmic force of deception. If you think of the Stoic's idea of Amor Fati, then a first principle like 'deception is a force of nature' makes a lot of practical sense.
Resist the temptation to get angry, have faith in chaos and unlock mysteries of life.
[0] https://mikemcclaughry.wordpress.com/2017/06/29/pat-prices-d...
[1] https://thetanetworkersscientology.wordpress.com/2016/03/16/...
So they don't understand science at all but claim to use it. Typical. Singularitarians are a new version of scientologists which are a new version of mormons which are a new version of protestants or siekhs which are a new version of ... You get the point. Different details, same dumb stupidity and desire to control, use, and take advantage of others. It's just interesting to see such groups at different stages of their development and how the wider society around them responds. Typically there seems to be more acceptance as these religions get older, which is hardly surprising given humans' proclivity towards blind tradition following even when such blind following is dangerous. Humans have a hard time being skeptical of even the dumbest ideas if they are codified in tradition and this is something that such religions rely on to become established over time. Such religions usually survive in the long term if they can make it past a generation or a few decades and establish themselves as tradition, something singularitarianism is struggling heavily with currently. Fascinating to see how illogical ideas and systems of control like these religions come about.
They do ban and I can't think of a too much more appropriate site.
Their reporting is generally on par with lying.
I won't read their stuff because of ad clicks. So it might be a good article just like Fox does some good stuff, but I have read hundreds of their articles and fool me once....
I agree. I think an economic singularity should be a given, based on the fact that all economic ROI is at least exponential (pe^(rt)) and has consistently performed exponentially for over 100 years.
The notion that this will mean a happiness singularity, complete freedom of choice for everyone, or even human survival are up for debate.
We can expect this to be true of other business models as well; the question is where the limits are.
so, I mean, what's the business model.
The reality is that moores law has petered out, but we have algorithms now (deep learning) which are optimized for parallel execution.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FLOPS [2] https://aiimpacts.org/current-flops-prices/
I expect the author's brief was "1000 words slagging off silicon valley".
It is hard to foresee the consequences of a paradigm shift.
People creating electronics with vacuum tubes never suspected that transistors and IC would change things within a few decades.
Same with flight. Couple of years before the first flight people were flying in baloons. Couple of years later, in airliners.
* Knocks Vinge as having "lacked the business savvy to fully exploit the market potential of his ideas" – as if he'd tried, and failed, instead of just been a successful professor & award-winning SF author. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernor_Vinge)
* Sneers at Kurzweil as if he's one-act Singularity huckster – when in fact his notoriety stems from a long, successful career as a inventor/technologist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil). The exponentialism is an important part of his later writing & speaking, and perhaps a motivating/unifying theme for his other work and overall optimism, but hardly the whole Kurzweil.
A funny thing about Kurzweil is despite the far-out nature of his projections & predictions & prescriptions, in his tone and presentation, he's still really understated – a mild-mannered professor making interesting observations.
If there's even an outside chance he's right, he (or someone else) would be justified with a far more emphatic, 'evangelical', alarm-raising presentation. "Big changes are coming, we'd better get ready!"
that seems to suggest someone else other than us is creating thise changes and they are going to catch us unawares. The rate at which change happens in technology is painstakingly slow. Each rev of a product typically takes a year. Scientific research typically takes even longer. At such a slow rate of change its hard to imagine something is going to hit us in the face before we know it. Instead, it's more likely we'll chart a slow path towards the future. Slow enough that even somehting like the singularity, if it were to happen would occur over an extended period of time which would mean it would no longer be a singularity but a far more gradual change.
My take: Kurzweil is missing the mark to suggest unabated growth in computing or anything like a true "singularity" where a curve goes to infinity. However, I think his overall insight into exponential effects and how unintuitive they are is brilliant and basically true. All of us who have been around for a few decades can clearly see the world changing dramatically in some dimensions, and the general expectation is that it will continue to do so. Some of the developments this century will probably be quite mind bending.
Kurzweil is definitely a strong optimist, and my feeling is he's a bit too optimistic, but I suspect that he may be right in the rough sense that the technologies discovered this century will help more than they hurt.
The commentary on the religiosity of technology is an interesting one, deserving more thought.
Giving the devil his due, Kurzweil has been proved wrong on almost every single prediction he's made up to the current day--at least from my reading of his 'Singularity' book. Mostly as a consequence of the bottom falling out of Moore's Law.
But like most articles addressing the singularity thesis, the author completely fails to understand it even in the most rudimentary way. The singularity hypothesis depends on several plausible but not guaranteed steps of cause and effect; the author could have discussed anyone, and, as other commenters have mentioned, there are valid reasons to think the singularity highly unlikely. But like so many bloggers, their thought process only went as far as 'sounds weird to me personally--must be a religion!'
More generally, it's both lazy and extremely dangerous to dismiss an idea simply because it seems unusual to you. This is called the Absurdity Bias, and is fairly well demonstrated.
Just for example, there are comments in this thread saying that while some of the radical predictions of technologists are possible, there's 'also nothing to suggest humans are capable of developing it.' Sounds a lot like something Lord Byron would have said about antibiotics or powered flight a few years back.
I struggle to see how life could really be so different. I haven't read of any concrete examples of how faster computers will lead to a singularity. Wealth will change hands and economic inequality will continue to increase, but that's about it. Maybe it'll be different if research in genetics, nanotech, and energy are driven by advanced algorithms. There's still a lot we don't know about the human brain.
For context, I have a background in neuroscience and computer science... the claims about brain modeling are particularly ferociously ignorant in an era when we don't even have the foggiest macroscopic clue about the neurobiological mechanisms that enable reasoning, and in which fundamental neuroscience hasn't evolved substantially at any level above protein expression pathways in the last 25 years. If you have a thick illusion of understanding regarding how the brain works, don't feel alone - it plagued professionals in neuroscience for the 40-50 years who felt that the big breakthrough in unifying AI, systems neuroscience, and neurobiology must be right around the corner. Every new decade just deepens how crude these original notions were, and how blatantly false our estimates of our knowledge were.
The singularity is not near. It wasn't near in 2000, it won't be near in 2100, and my guess would be that it will never be near, in the same way the end times in Revelations won't be near anytime soon.
Frankly I'm happy to have people around who care about preventing improbable catastrophes, but biological and nuclear warfare, running out of water, collision with a sufficiently destructive meteor, a freak volcanic eruption off the known charts... even for the love of god encountering hostile extraterrestrials (? why not) are higher on the likely threat list in my head.
I think the attraction lies mostly in the fact that the argument avoids the "nasty bits" of reality that make real systems hard. Epidemiology, for example, has a lot to say about preventing the spread of humanity threatening diseases. But the truth is in the gritty details, not in high flown logical deductions.
What next, the Church of Drakes Equation?
Um, what? He is a successful CS professor, and beloved hard SF author. Anyone should be happy to be as successful as he is.
At any rate, the singularity is coming, wether we like it out not.
My main argument is: look at Intel Corp.
Intel is emblematic of the entire semiconductor industry. Like with how much they have struggled with the recent process nodes. And look at the industry roadmap, there are only a few nodes left for any kind of silicon lithography.
What is the tech sector going to do when there are no gains to be had with making chips cheaper and higher performance? Do you think Intel's investors are going to be OK if they say they can't make chips and better than they currently are? The stock price will crash, board members and executives will be fired, to be replaced by people promising a return to growth.
Is there a way forward for Intel? Yes, several, falling under the broad category called molecular nanotechnology, which is all about building machines with atomic scale precision. This will allow Intel to build faster chips, but will also be a revolution in other areas too. And then we can reasonable talk about things like biological immortality.