The Second Apocalypse
Miscellaneous Chatter => Philosophy & Science => Topic started by: What Came Before on April 24, 2013, 05:47:58 pm
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I've been interested in this for a while, mainly through reading TSA but also from David Zindell's Neverness series (anyone else out there who read and enjoyed those?). I'd be interested in any books / websites which lay out what exactly is meant by the singularity, without me having to wade through hundreds of pages of technobabble, so could anyone suggest anything? Any links to weird / amazing new technological abilities (I'm thinking the kind of thing Jorge posts every so often on TPB) would also be welcome!
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1) Are We Ready for the Coming 'Age of Abundance'? : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ceEog1XS5OI&feature=related
2) Singularity Institute: http://singinst.org/
eta: This critique of the SI leads to a lot of other places: http://lesswrong.com/lw/cbs/thoughts_on_the_singularity_institute_si/
3) Your Brain on Drugs - Psychedelics and the Singularity: http://yourbrainondrugs.net/2012/01/jason-silva-on-psychedelics-new-technology-and-the-singularity/
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Thanks for the links, have so far watched the youtube one. Didn't make me any more optimistic about the future...
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How do you see the future unfolding?
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I'm not so sure, but somehow I think having contact lenses that are able to contact to the internet will not solve all humanity's problems! Seems like those panelists all saw people's problems as being fixable through some super-smart engineering, not much talk of morality or any shifts in how people treat each other and the world.
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The Singularity seems so vaguely defined to me that I honestly just think it's the Rapture for nerds. Which is easy to flip into a dystopia for opponents of such world views.
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I think the idea that we'll hit technology that reshapes society is inevitable. Whether this leads to paradise or perdition is another matter, and one I suspect won't be as good or as bad as anyone expects.
Personally I like the idea of nootropics and other endeavors to increase our intelligences.
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I support what you said about other endeavors to increase our intelligences. I'm a major advocate of non-invasive neuropractices and I find that nootropics and neurocosmetic surgery simply enable human laziness.
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Disclaimer: the following is merely my opinion on the matter. I tend to write in a very definitive and confident voice because I'm used to writing academic papers wherein I need to take a firm stance.
I haven't really been impressed with any literary representation of a technological singularity that I've come across. I don't totally blame the authors for this, however, because I think it is, quite literally, an unrepresentable phenomenon.
One science fiction author who has dealt with this topic admirably is Charles Stross; his novel Singularity Sky is very good, despite his benevolent AI (which I don't really buy). Definitely worth the attention of those interested.
Personally, I find the singularity to be a fascinating premise, in all aspects of its manifestation (i.e. gravitational singularities, technological singularities, even historical singularities). The truly damning thing about them is not only can't we comprehend them (since they're only, at the most, indirectly accessible to us), we can't even apprehend them. We can only be made aware of their appearance in retrospect, or induce their presence through other phenomenal evidence.
Ray Kurzweil is the current spokesman for the technological singularity, and he borrowed the term from the science fiction author Vernor Vinge. In Kurzweil's opinion, the singularity emerges when technology itself begins expanding more rapidly than humanity can keep up with. We won't have any idea when the singularity occurs, because by that time it will have exceeded the limits of our apprehension (and will take place so quickly-I'm talking Planck units-that our systems of measurement might actually break down if they tried to track it). Historical and gravitational singularities work in analogous ways. Historical singularities (i.e. revolutionary periods, the shifts between cultural paradigms or epistemes) are never apparent as they are happening; they can only be theorized and organized in retrospect, after their effects have taken root in the cultural consciousness. Likewise, a gravitational singularity actually physically prohibits us from apprehending it; we can only apprehend the evidence for it.
I tend to read more philosophical works than natural/physical science, but I actually find a lot of useful arguments for conceptualizing singularities in the works of Hegel and Badiou (unfortunately, with both, you'll have to wade through hundreds of pages of sometimes incomprehensible mire).
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Hoorah for philosophy writings and subjecting myself to thinkers who I'd never otherwise read.
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I support what you said about other endeavors to increase our intelligences. I'm a major advocate of non-invasive neuropractices and I find that nootropics and neurocosmetic surgery simply enable human laziness.
My judgement on laziness and intelligence depends on the extent to which hereditarians are correct.
Personally, I find that most resistance to transhumanism comes from those who attach far too much meaning to the competitive capitalist system. Bill Maher cynically notes that we will be more entertained by athletes on steroids, but this isn't that different from people getting plastic surgery in my mind.
If we can make ourselves better, and thereby accomplish more, we as humanity should do so with the only barrier being moral limits.
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Not to be contrarian because I don't inherently disagree with you. If I have these conversations I make a point to try to affect the positive in any little way I can.
Personally, though clearly, I'm getting off task here, I feel its some kind of balance. Certainly, genetics gives different foundations but among neurotypically developed individuals - i.e. most of the Western Empires population - this suggests little difference to me other than that any given individual will have particular set of "strengths" (in this context, those "innate" abilites which, if identified, he could learn more quickly due to his hereditary genetics). I think what defines us is the brain's plasticity.
I feel with Bakker's blog especially, these couple threads of conversation are set to get out of hand. As I had mentioned to Jorge in another - something I'd apologize for because I came off as an ass just suggesting a book without its context - the Mind & the Brain highlights a series of events in Jeffrey Schwartz's life as an MD that led him to formulate talking therapies for severe OCD.
Essentially, he's showed on numerous occasions that abstraction has the power to mediate the symptoms of OCD - arguably even the cause - a condition that's been previously treated with such winning strategies as chemical cocktails or shock and aversion therapies.
Now here's whats coming - what Bakker essentially is philosophizing with his schtick, not so much BBT:
If I tell a person that they might make themselves more intelligent, creative, etc, through hard work and determination - by spending time practicing, embodying certain activities - which will cumulminate in something *new* but something still "human" - as arguable as that really is considering what we've done to our ecological cycles (not global warming) and evolutionary mechanisms on this planet?
or
If I tell a person that they can do Limitless for a price - which trust me, is weak imaginings compared to our capacities for change.
Which will they choose?
Laziness, friend.
I really feel that outsourcing, far from being some neuvo business strategy, is actually an inherent human bias. We look for any and all opportunities to outsource our agency because, in my opinion, no one actually wants to take responsibility for their actions.
I mean, projection bias – the tendency to unconsciously assume that others (or one's future selves) share one's current emotional states, thoughts and values or self-serving bias – the tendency to claim more responsibility for successes than failures. It may also manifest itself as a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests (see also group-serving bias) come to mind.
Also, attribution theory:
Interpersonal attribution
Sometimes, when your action or motives for the action are questioned, you need to explain the reasons for your action. Interpersonal attributions happen when the causes of the events involve two or more individuals. More specifically, you will always want to present yourself in the most positive light in interpersonal attributions. For example, let’s say Jaimie and her boyfriend had a fight. When Jaimie explains her situation to her friends, she will say she tried everything to avoid a fight but she will blame her boyfriend that he nonetheless started a fight. This way, Jaimie is seen as a peacemaker to her friends whereas her boyfriend is seen as the one who started it all.
There's a more pertinent example stuck in my mind, If I can just remember it's context. And I just remembered it: Attributional bias.
In psychology, an attributional bias is a cognitive bias that affects the way we determine who or what was responsible for an event or action (attribution). It is a cognitive set that may interfere with social interaction.
So we could bundle these and probably theorize some meta-cognitive bias like "misascribed agency:" wherein any circumstance someone mentally decides they have no agency, they look for any and all opportunities to regain agency from X - a variable representing any form of "You can do it, if..."
And, as Bakker says, a society in which we are bombarded with "Believe in Yourself" so at odds with our actually individual utility, it takes a lot to understand which choices I'm responsible for making and which were forced upon me. It's difficult to assume that I'm not responsible for many of my failings.
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Personally, I find that most resistance to transhumanism comes from those who attach far too much meaning to the competitive capitalist system.
I've seen opposition coming from the opposite as well. Left wing populists and such fearing that transhumanism will create a hyper stratified caste like society due to the rich being able to afford such modifications far sooner.
I'm afraid there are many reasons to oppose transhumanism. It's going to be a rough hurdle to get most people to accept it.
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Well, the argument from the Left makes more sense to me. There will be strata in who gets what treatments, that's almost certainly inevitable.
It's funny, Vox and the ilk were laughing about AIs could do a liberal journalists job, but didn't seem to want to consider that AIs have already demonstrated the ability to diagnose patients with a fair degree of accuracy - beating out first year residents IIRC.
There are going to be huge problems, but I think in the long run we'll see some remarkable benefits come out of the Singularity. Mind you, I think uploading your brain into a computer won't be one those benefits.
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We don't know enough about the brain to say if that is even possible, much less desirable.
I'm an unapologetic transhumanist, but I still think many of my cohorts make huge unfounded assumptions about the progress and nature of technological advance. The singularity is one such assumption: In effect that Moore's Law has no upper limit and that it applies to every variety of technology. At its most extreme, it can even invoke a quasi-religious logic from the more fanciful transhumanists; along the lines of "I can't prove it can't be done, therefore it is inevitable."
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Cool speculative timeline of future advances:
http://envisioningtech.com/envisioningtech.png
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Seems like an aggressive schedule for some columns and no so much for others. Pretty cool nonetheless.
For example, there is a Mars Mission currently scheduled for 2020 I think (NASA), while a lot of the biotech stuff seems a bit optimistic.