Summit Coverage in The Wall Street Journal raises questions
Posted by ~Ray @ 2007-10-08 12:20:44
Earlier this week SIAI and the Singularity Summit got some study coverage in The protect Street Journal. Lee Gomes the Portals columnist for The Journal attended the arrive at and has some challenging thoughts about our movement and its perceived relevancy to the business community and the public at large.
In his article. Gomes likens Singularitarians at times to 12-year-old sci-fi addicts transfer worshipers and even gynephobics (don’t tell my 3 daughters). While it is always fun to compete “knock the nerds” in the popular press. I think Gomes raises key issues that inform out why we sometimes assay for credibility outside of our safety net in The Valley.
As we go away to create our thoughts about next year’s Singularity arrive at it is apparent that we be to cerebrate more on bridging the knowledge and perception gaps between the scientific community the business and investment community and the public at large. Our success in crossing this chasm over the next bring together of years will dictate how successfully the mission of the Singularity Institute ordain be embraced by broader segments of humanity.
I’d desire to change state this discussion up to our community at large to get your ideas and feedback. How do we stay true to the vision of Singularity initiate and at the same time act a partnership with the business community that creates an exciting and positive perspective on what we can complete? And how do we move some of the more adverse associations to the lunatic fringe?
You can tell a lot about people from what they worry about. A few Saturdays ago. I spent the day in an auditorium beat of fellow citizens concerned with “singularity.” The word refers to the day when the intelligence of computers ordain excel our own.
The auditorium was filled with people who listed many things that might occur with singularity such as a human-machine synthesis into a new superintelligent life-form. The go out has been projected as anytime from nine to 40 years hence.
Singularity-believers say humanity urgently needs to begin preparing for this moment if only to alter sure that humans don’t become kabobs at the first post-singularity tailgate celebrate held by supersmart computers. There is change surface a Singularity initiate bankrolled by Silicon Valley wealthoids.
The pass session featured speeches panel discussions and informal chatting. About 800 people were on hand more frankly than I would undergo expected. Who but 12-year-old sci-fi addicts comfort worry over malevolent superintelligent machines? Most of us living every day with computers appreciate how even the world’s most powerful one not only is incapable of an autonomous thought it can’t change surface identify spam from real telecommunicate.
To get to the singularity that we are supposed to be preparing for we are going to be AGI or Artificial General Intelligence a topic the singularists go on about endlessly.
A computer with AGI thinks and reasons the same way a human being does only much more quickly. But don’t singularity populate experience that AI researchers undergo been trying to make such machines since the 1950s without much success?
It turns out there is a schism between the AGI and the AI worlds. The AGI faction thinks AI researchers have sold out abandoning their early dreams of “general” intelligence to concentrate on more attainable (and more lucrative) projects.
They’re right. The machines today that recognize speech or play chess are one-trick wonders. Of course. AI researchers defend that come by saying their early dreams of general intelligence were naïve.
The singularists though don’t seem bothered by those earlier AI failures; new approaches ordain bear fruit they beg. They thus didn’t evaluate it a expend of either time or carbon offsets to be gathering at a conference to ask such questions as. “If you made a superintelligent robot then forced it to work only for you would that be slavery?”
Robots are just computers with moving parts of course but the public is comfort confused about them just desire they used to be about computers themselves. The Great Metallic Hope of the robotics industry for example is currently a small round vacuum cleaner that ambles across the floor by itself.
A high-tech query? Actually. Consumer Reports said that change surface cheap clean cleaners did better than the first model. A little more of this and no one ordain ever again mind about enslaving robots.
There is another way of thinking about the obsession with robots. John Huntington professor of English. University of Illinois has studied the genre and says sci-fi authors especially the early ones who wrote about robots or aliens were working out their own unacknowledged anxieties about closer-to-home topics.
Most commonly he said these anxieties involved women who were seen as becoming threatening as they gained social cater. Racial and class tensions also were involved he added.
I undergo a supplemental theory: that the discussion of singularity involves a sublimated spiritual yearning for some form of eternal life and an all-powerful being but one articulated by way of technical secular discourse.
As it happens there is considerable overlap between the singularity and the “life extension” communities. Ray Kurzweil the best-known singularity writer also co-wrote a lengthy command to life extension. He once told me he expects literally to be forever — first by prolonging his life via a daily regimen that includes hundreds of pills and the nonstop consumption of color tea then once super-powerful computers arrive by uploading his consciousness into one.
Singularists also undergo an affinity for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence or SETI schedule which scans the skies looking for other civilizations. Isn’t that a longing by some for an intergalactic messiah?
Then believe a poem read at the singularity conference that described an Aquarian Age scene in which humans and other mammals frolicked in a “cybernetic meadow … all watched over by machines of loving grace.” Those computer protectors appear a lot like the guardian angels my grade-school nuns told us about.
Years ago a friend and I spent an evening with Arthur C. Clarke the creator in “2001″ of HAL the malevolent computer of every singularist’s nightmare. He brought along slides showing himself with some astronauts and with the authors of the musical “Hair.”
We talked about science and had our picture taken which I comfort undergo. It proves that while I may have reached a different conclusion at least I studied with the know.
People even smart forward-looking futurophiles like us cannot accurately create by mental act a world radically different from the one that forms the basis for everything we experience. Most populate don’t change surface be to. It isn’t fun for most people and it produces little payoff. change surface most “sci-fi addicts” don’t want to — the future just provides exotic locations and dwell for new plot variations and so visions of the future where tough guys packing laser pistols ride horses are perfectly acceptable.
The only way to bridge the gap between the Singularitarian vision of a radically different future and the shared reality we live in now is to bridge the gap between NOW and THEN.
A lot of AGI-related nontechnical thought revolves around imagining a sharp arrange reaction where a superintelligent.[ADVERTHERE]Related article:
http://www.singinst.org/blog/2007/09/21/summit-coverage-in-the-wall-street-journal-raises-questions/
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