I came upon the story of the Singularity University this week (Video from the Singularity blog). It got me thinking about what these possibilities mean for our society.
To give short explanation, the singularity I am talking about is the point in time where machines become smart enough to be able improve themselves. While I agree that this is rather vague, the possibility or the definition of the singularity is not really what I want to talk about. My main focus is actually the inherent advances in technology and how these affect us.
The most important part of the Singularity is the tremendous knowledge that will (did?) become available to us. Right now, anyone can find out relatively accurate details about the history of Zimbabwe with minutes. It does however take an external device to do so. Eventually, technology will let us embed this knowledge into our bodies. It will be up to the people to decide whether or not they want to get this enhancement. Assuming this goes forward, you will have a large amount of people with the knowledge of the world available to them nearly as easily as their own memory. Interestingly, this means we will be moving closer to having a hive-mind.
To conclude, I just want to add that, while the future technological advances will be undoubtedly interesting, the past advances, what has happened in the last 5 years, have given us the tools to drastically affect our society. This is what I will be talking about in the second part of my "Democracy is flawed" post.
4 comments:
Good post Steph. I haven't checked the blog in a while and to my surprise there was over 15 posts since the last time. Read em all... Great writing and organization.
For this post I have to ask how likely is the singularity? It seems much more of a cool sci-fi concept than an actual probability. I don't think it will ever be considered ethical to link any sort of internet-like database to anybody's consciousness. This will obviously lead to information overload, insanity and not to mention a way to hack into someone's personality...
I wouldn't say "never" (or "ever"). .. but what I'm talking about would be a consequence of the technological advances we have now (with or without the singularity).
The thing is that we are really close to having the entire net at our disposition all the time. The difference is just in the interface.
Interesting thread: While I agree most of the actual facts regarding the link between the singularity and AI remains speculatif at best: I wouldn't quite put-down sci-fi yet, remember Jule Vernes and his Subs and space-travel``fantasies``, I mean sci-fi sometimes is just a genius's avant-guard description of where science will be taking us in the future(minus the drama and fear-mongering). Any how, If a singularity is going to happen (which I define as being a moment in time when the net becomes ``self-aware``, prob not that way off in time since we've already lost control of it), it's gonna be a result of Quantum Computing (forget Brain-Machine interfaces), which is the most powerful theoretical tool possible for Data-processing (uses powerful Quantum effects such as entaglement and decoherence, just like our own human mind for creative self-replicating algorithm production). It's still all experimental (Harper Gouv just gave-out 50$ million for research in the field), but it's prob the only powerful enough system to contain and control a Hilbert space in a linear matrix based on any binary system to exploit it (i.e AI or Ghost in a Shell)
I still think Brain Machine Interfaces will be very important in the near future. On the consumer market, Abit already has one device out. I really think that within a year or so, we will have all the tools necessary to internalize the internet into a human being. It will of course take another few years for it to become a reality and more years after that for Net Humans to become widespread but it is doable.
But yea, BMI has nothing to do with machines becoming intelligent. I don't think however that Quantum Computing is necessary. When it becomes widespread, it will mean much much more powerful machines, but I think that machines (the internet?) already have the power to be self-aware.
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