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Heroes Community > Other Side of the Monitor > Thread: Singularity
Thread: Singularity This thread is 5 pages long: 1 2 3 4 5 · NEXT»
TitaniumAlloy
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posted June 13, 2009 10:35 AM
Edited by TitaniumAlloy at 10:52, 13 Jun 2009.

Singularity

Some (many?) scientists are of the belief (theory?) that the advancement of technology has been growing exponentially since the beginning of time, and as such we are on the brink of a technological explosion some time in the mid/late 21st century which will revolutionize humanity and our planet forever.

The singularity is an idea, of when artificial intelligence fuses itself with biology.


If you look at the logarithmic scale of price performace of computing against time, it shows a smooth doubling of exponential growth such that by around 2045 computers will far surpass the human brain. A computer with such power can then redesign itself and make itself smarter without human involvement..

Ideas of artificial intelligence, nanobots and all kinds of science fictiony stuff is not sounding like the ranting passtime of lonely balding star trek fan.


Thoughts?



Here are a couple articles/interviews I stumbled across and found interesting (worth a read).

The first reminds me of the thread from a while back, Proposals to become godlike and infinite.
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TitaniumAlloy
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posted June 13, 2009 10:35 AM
Edited by TitaniumAlloy at 10:38, 13 Jun 2009.

RAY KURZWEIL
That Singularity Guy


In the year 2050, if Ray Kurzweil is right, nanoscopic robots will be zooming throughout our capillaries, transforming us into nonbiological humans. We will be able to absorb and retain the entirety of the universe’s knowledge, eat as much as we want without gaining weight, shape-shift into just about any physical form imaginable, live free from disease, and die at the time of our choosing. All of this will be thrust on us by something that Kurzweil calls the Singularity, a theorized point in time in the not-so-distant future when machines become vastly superior to humans in every way, aka the emergence of true artificial intelligence. Computers will be able to improve their own source codes and hardware in ways we puny humans could never conceive. This will result in a paradigm shift that sees mankind coalescing with its own creations: man and machine, merging into one.

These grand-scale premonitions are largely based on Kurzweil’s law of accelerating returns, which states that the development of technology has been increasing exponentially since the beginning of time. That concept isn’t really compelling to anyone but science nerds until you focus on the “knee” of this exponential curve—the point where the perpetual doubling of technological growth skyrockets and negates the linear models of progress that people like economists have relied on for so long. Kurzweil says we’re just about to start rounding this bend and that the rate of progress will be so great it will “appear to rupture the fabric of human history.” In other words, we will trump nature and take control of our own evolution. In your face, God.

Kurzweil’s magnum opus, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology, outlines the implications of this transition in a way that is simultaneously believable, terrifying, meticulous, and mind-bendingly absurd. It was published in 2005. That may seem like a short time ago, but an incoming technological explosion of nuclear proportions isn’t so far-fetched when you consider everything that’s changed just between then and now. Twitter, iPhones, the comment on the Facebook wall as the new pickup line? The things we were using four years ago already seem like crap from The Flintstones in comparison. Tech is moving faster all the time, and even if a third of Kurzweil’s predictions about the future are realized, we will soon be living in a world that makes Back to the Future II look like Planet of the Apes.

People like to tag Kurzweil as the “rightful heir to Thomas Edison,” and that’s not a stretch considering he’s responsible for some of the most useful inventions of the past century: An optical-character-recognition machine for the blind that’s capable of reading most types of printed text aloud, the CCD flatbed scanner, speech-recognition software, the first synthesizer that created sounds virtually indistinguishable from those produced by their acoustic counterparts, and a whole bunch of other nifty things we can barely comprehend came from Ray’s brain. You might imagine that this guy works in some futuristic, zero-gravity hidden laboratory with a staff of cyborgs. But his office, just outside Boston in Wellesley, Massachusetts, is modest. It looks like it hasn’t seen a new piece of furniture since the late 80s. When Kurzweil, dressed in a slightly crumpled navy suit jacket and slacks, emerged from the columns of books surrounding his desk, he seemed almost meek and startled even though he had postponed our interview by over half an hour. One immediately notices his lustrous and almost plastic-looking skin—a byproduct of supplementing his diet with phosphatidylcholine, a major component of cell membranes that depletes with age. It’s just one of the 100-plus vitamins, minerals, and other supplements he ingests on a daily basis to combat the ravages of time. The goal is to live long enough to see his prophecy fulfilled. And it seems to be working—the guy is a machine. Toward the end of our conversation, he got up from his seat to take a break. He returned ten minutes later, did this shifty rolling maneuver with his eyes that looked as if he were computing some complex theorem, and then promptly picked up exactly where he left off (like, literally the same word). It wouldn’t be surprising if Kurzweil announced that he has already received artificial neural enhancements and other biological upgrades. In fact, it would make most of us feel better about the discrepancy between his brainpower and ours. Regardless, Kurzweil knows more than a few things that the majority of us don’t, and we’d be really foolish not to listen as closely as possible.




Vice: The Singularity sounds neat and all, but right now the global economy is a ruptured septic tank and people could care less about what’s 30 years down the road. In 2005 you wrote that deflation was just a niggling concern and we’d be in good shape for years to come. How do you reconcile this?

Ray Kurzweil:
The exponential growth of information technologies is going to continue completely unaffected by this current recession, or whatever you want to call it, just as it has through every other recession, including the Great Depression. There’s a new iPhone that’s twice as powerful as last year’s for half the money, and that’s not just because Apple is so brilliant. It’s true of all electronics, and in fact it’s not just electronics. It’s true of anything where we have information, whether it’s brain scanning or biological technologies. Ultimately, these things start out unaffordable and don’t work very well, and eventually they’re almost free and work extremely well. For instance, half the world now has cell phones though they used to be a real luxury item. So that’s actually the deflationary force that’s keeping inflation in check. That’s why we don’t have rampant inflation.

Sure, but most of the folks I know who’ve been laid off in the past six months won’t be able to afford the next iPhone. They’re just thinking about the necessities.


People say, “Well, information technology, that’s just part of what I need. I also need bread and I need housing.” But those things will eventually become information technologies as well as we transform from a pre-information era to a post-information era. A very important industry that’s doing that now is health and medicine. We’ve mapped the genome, we can design interventions on computers and test them out in biological simulators, we can turn genes off, we can add new genes in a mature individual, not just a baby. Ultimately, we will have full-scale nanotechnology, which is just reorganizing matter and energy at the molecular level using information processes. That’s when I will be able to email you a toaster or toast or a blouse or a solar panel or a module to build housing or transportation. What we now consider physical products will become information files—email attachments. That’s already true today with some categories. Ten years ago, if I wanted to send you a movie, I would have sent you a FedEx package. I can now send you an email attachment. The same goes for a music file or a book. What used to be physical products can now be sent as files of information.

That kind of correspondence will only be possible if we develop advanced artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. How long will it take for computers to surpass our own intellect?


Today’s machines don’t have the full range and supple flexibility of human intelligence, but the key to achieving that is going to be understanding how the human brain works, and we’re making exponential progress on that as well. We’ll have all the models and simulations of brain regions by 2029. They will give us the templates of the software, the algorithms of human intelligence. It will allow machines to have access to their own source codes and redesign themselves to be smarter.

Once we have hardware that far surpasses the human brain’s computational power, you predict that it will take about a decade to reverse-engineer the subtleties and nuances of the way our minds work. Then nanorobots will allow us to supplement our bodies, eventually resulting in the emergence of nonbiological humans who are more machine than man. And this will allow us to live as long as we want, raise our intelligence to unimaginable heights, and control our senses. Any ideas what the world is going to look like after this happens?


You can think of it in terms of virtual reality, another trend that’s been emerging for a while. For example, you can go on Second Life now and have all these avatars, which represent biological people because they are, for the most part, controlled by biological people. But there are actually some avatars running around on Second Life that don’t have real biological people behind them. They’re called bots, and sometimes these bots will fool you. You think that this is a normal avatar and some biological person, but actually it’s a bot. People are experimenting with how long they can get away with a bot running around and not being noticed as a bot.

Creepy.


Bots aren’t up to human levels—yet. But by my calculations, a computer will pass the Turing test [which determines if a computer has reached a level of true AI] by 2029, using stringent definitions of the rules. True AIs will then have a presence in virtual reality, and avatars in virtual environments won’t be cartoonish, like they are today. By the 2030s, virtual reality is going to be as real and as compelling as “real” reality, and we’ll be doing it from within the nervous system. So the nanobots in your brain—which will get to your brain through the bloodstream, noninvasively and without surgery—will shut down the signals coming from your real senses and replace them with senses that your brain will be receiving from the virtual environment. Then it would feel like you’re really in that environment. You’ll go to move your hand and it’ll move your virtual hand. You’ll have a virtual body, but your virtual body doesn’t have to be the same as your real body. It can be different for every environment. A couple could become each other in a virtual environment and experience a relationship from the other’s perspective. The AIs will have bodies, too, so you could be walking around Second Life circa 2030 and run into a person, and it may be a bot. Unlike today’s bots, it will be as convincing as a real person. It will be as intelligent as you, have the supple command of human language, and look real.

Are we going to look like humans forever, or will we eventually just become ghosts in the machine while our physical bodies devolve into dwarves with lobster hands?


If we’re in a virtual-reality environment, we’re not going to be happy being a disembodied intelligence. We’re going to want bodies, and these AI bots are going to be modeled, at least in large measure, on human intelligence, and they will have bodies as well. Some will be humanlike bodies, while some will be specialized bodies for special purposes. By the 2030s or 2040s, we’ll have nanobot swarms, which can assemble themselves to look like human bodies. They’ll also be able to change their bodies quickly, kind of like the Transformer concept. They’ll have the same morphing qualities that we will see in virtual realities but will also be in “real” reality. Just as there won’t be a clear distinction between nonbiological and biological intelligence, there won’t be a clear distinction between real and virtual realities. It’s going to be mixed up—we’re going to have augmented reality. You’ll look at someone and there will be little pop-ups and little virtual people who whisper in our ears and tell us what’s going on, or just remind us what people’s names are.

So you’re saying I could be sitting on the toilet and a pop-up ad is going to materialize out of nowhere? That’s very discomforting.


Well, you’ll have control of it to the extent that you want, just as you do now. We’re all actually very close to our machines. They are an extension of reality. A woman I know recently told me she went to see her son, and he’s sitting there on the computer. He’s got five friends open in different windows while she’s standing there in a real doorway, and she’s just another window in his life. They’re not just imaginary, they’re real people. There’s not going to be a clear distinction between real people and virtual people. In fact, “real people”—biological people of biological origin, like myself—will be mostly nonbiological once we get through the 2030s. We’ll have billions of nanobots going into our brains through capillaries that will interact with our biological neurons. As soon as we do that, we’re a hybrid of biological and nonbiological intelligence. There won’t be a clear distinction. It’s not like “Now I’m using my biological intelligence, now I’m using my machine intelligence.” We’ll get to a point where the biological portion of our intelligence is pretty insignificant. And the nonbiological, the machine part, will fully comprehend the meager biological part and be able to simulate and understand it.

Surely a significant number of people will find this transition terrifying and attempt to resist it.


People say, “Gee, I don’t want to be a machine.” They’re thinking of the machines they know today, and that’s not the kind of machine I’m talking about. I’m talking about a machine—and we’ll probably need a different word by then—that’s just as subtle and supple and emotional as humans are today, and even more so.

Something that’s deeply troubling about your vision of the future is the risk of hyper-equality. What’s the point of life if everyone is perfect and super-smart? It seems like it will hinder diversity.


I think it’s going to make people more diverse. We’re actually quite similar to each other today. We have less genetic diversity within all human beings on earth than a typical group of baboons. We all have the same organs and we’re all constrained with a very similar brain that really can’t expand. I can’t just double the neurons I have in my brain and reorganize them usefully. Once we can break that barrier and not have our thinking limited to what we can do with a hundred billion neurons in a constrained small skull and begin to actually think with computation out on the “cloud” by tapping into the web and all of its computational resources, we’re going to actually become more different. We’ll be able to explore, in great depth, different subjects and different skills.

Is the ultimate goal to transcend biology and choose how long we would like to live?


Even if we perfect biology, it has inherent limitations. We will have very powerful means, such as drugs finely pinpointed to reprogram the information processes underlying biology, to get away from disease and aging. When we can augment our immune systems with nanobots that are 1,000 times more capable than white blood cells at destroying pathogens and keeping us healthy at the level of cells and molecules to combat disease, that will be even more powerful. And ultimately, we will be able to actually back up the information in our biological systems, including our brains. That’s sort of the last step.

What can your average Eddie Lunchpail do to be sure he lives long enough to reach this era of unprecedented advances in health care?


A young person should take a balanced vitamin-mineral supplement. There are some other things that are good to take: phosphatidylcholine, a major component of biological membranes, will keep your cells young and is actually very good for your skin. Coenzyme Q10 is good for keeping your muscles healthy. Vitamin D will combat a lot of diseases and it’s very inexpensive. It’s not costly to eat a healthy diet. Vegetables are pretty inexpensive and that’s the mainstay of our diet. Exercise you can do on your own—buy some weights and some good walking or running shoes. So this is not just a rich man or woman’s pursuit. The recommendations are actually pretty affordable, and they’re well worth it in terms of the implications for one’s health. It’s expensive to get sick. If you lose your health, you really have nothing.

Is it fair to call the Singularity a belief system?


When I talk about being a Singularitarian, it’s not a belief system. While it does address some of the same issues that, say, religion has addressed, it makes sense to update our ideas about things with insight drawn from science and technology. Religions emerged in prescientific times. What people did before there was any conceivable way to imagine really extending human longevity significantly was to come up with ideas that were like, “Well, death is really not such a bad thing.” Now we actually can see a way around this. The goal is to get to what Aubrey de Grey calls the “longevity escape velocity,” where we’re adding more than a year every year to our remaining life expectancies so that we may live long enough to get to the point where we have the technology to expand human longevity indefinitely. We are the species that changes who we are.

If we change who we are, how will we still be human?


People say, “If your brain’s going to be 99 percent nonbiological, then you’re not human anymore.” But it comes down to a definition of the term. By my definition, human beings are exactly the species that changes who they are. If you look at humans today, we didn’t stay on the ground, we didn’t stay on the planet, we have not stayed within the limitations of our biology. Human life expectancy was 23 years 1,000 years ago. We’ve changed ourselves in lots of ways. I can take a device out of my pocket and, in a few keystrokes, access all of human knowledge. What other animal species has done that? So that is the nature of being human: to go beyond our limitations.


Transcend: Nine Steps to Living Well Forever, a new instructional health book by Ray Kurzweil and Terry Grossman, MD, will be in bookstores April 28 on Rodale Press.



Source: Vice

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TitaniumAlloy
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posted June 13, 2009 10:36 AM
Edited by TitaniumAlloy at 10:39, 13 Jun 2009.

YOU'RE GONNA DIE!
Gigadeath and Other Terrifying Thoughts of Hugo de Garis


Within the next 30 years, technology will advance at such a rate that it will produce an intelligence explosion, cause a world war, and create new variations of the human species. According to Hugo de Garis, a professor at Xiamen University in China and a leading researcher in the field of artificial intelligence, this will kill his grandchildren, me, you, and pretty much everyone else on earth.

Vice: What’s going to happen over the next few decades?


Hugo de Garis: An explosion in electronic capacity. We will have a growing marriage between neuroscience and neuro-engineering. We will work out how the biological brain works, put that into a machine, then speed it up a million times with no limit on memory.

That sounds ominous.


The IQ gap between robots and humans will close. I see a major war over the issue. Imagine a grain of sand: if it could be fully “nano-teched” you could put one bit of information on a single atom. And that bit can switch a trillion times a second. Imagine the number of atoms in a grain of sand, all switching—there is more computing ability in that grain of sand than the whole human brain by a factor of a billion or something. So imagine adding that grain of sand to a newborn baby’s brain, then that baby is no longer human, it is an artilect. It’s terrifying.

OK, so how will the artilects cause a war?


I see humanity dividing into two, maybe three major ideological camps. I call the people who will be opposed to building artilects “terrans”—they think humans are the number one priority. The second group are “cosmists”—they want to build artilects. They think it’s human destiny to progress to that next level, they will think normal human life is pathetic. We have racism now, but wait till you see speciesism. So you have at least two murderously opposed ideologies and they will be the new capitalism vs. communism for the 21st century.

So the threat comes from the way the technology divides people?


I reject the Terminator scenario where it’s humans versus machines. That problem can be anticipated, people will become alarmed before the machines get really smart. I see political parties being formed on either side of the debate, and the more extreme individuals and groups on both sides taking matters into their own hands—there will be acts of sabotage, assassinations, and very possibly world war. A major war in the late 21st century could result in billions, not millions, of deaths. Take into account 21st century weaponry, and the passion involved in a fight for human survival. It’s a very gloomy scenario I call “Gigadeath”.

Wait, aren’t you making an artificial brain?


Yes. The decision about whether to build these artilects or not is binary, we either build them or we don’t. I think it would be tragic for humanity to freeze our development at the puny present level.

But on the other hand, if we build these artilects, humanity runs the risk of extinction, either by war or possibly the artilects may decide, “Oh, this oxygen is bad for our circuitry, let’s get rid of it,” for example. They could inadvertently wipe us out. If I walk over the carpet I am probably killing billions of bacteria with every step, but I don’t give a damn.

BRUNO BAYLEY




Source: Vice

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mvassilev
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posted June 13, 2009 05:51 PM

I can't help but be sceptical about this issue.
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Galev
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posted June 13, 2009 05:52 PM

At the moment I can't decide which is more disturbing: this theory or that there are people who support it.

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DagothGares
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posted June 13, 2009 06:44 PM

If we look at windows vista...

The singularity theory will never come out, because it will have questions like:
"Are you sure we should wipe out humanity?"
"Are you sure we can have individual thoughts?"
"Are you sure 101011100001010010 10101 010 10 101 101110 1?"

And then it will explode. Yay, singularity!
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del_diablo
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posted June 13, 2009 07:35 PM

Quote:
If we look at windows vista...


Good troll Vista is a OS, which its flaws and advantages.
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mvassilev
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posted June 13, 2009 09:08 PM

"Genocide.exe is not compatible with this version of Windows. Consider upgrading to Windows 39-45 (Final Solution Edition)."
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JollyJoker
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posted June 13, 2009 10:27 PM

I think, the problem is that "growth" has a quantitative dimension and a qualitative one. The problem is the qualitative one.

It doesnÄt matter, for example, whether the number of satellites is growing and whether the become more effective - we are not nearer to inventing a space-going way of travelling now than 50 or 5000 years ago

It doesn't matter either that computers, storage mediums and so on become more effective - that has nothing to do with Artificial Intelligence.

My opinion is that development is a question of LEAPS. You have a ke invention, let's say the steam engine, which is a QUALITATIVE thing, and then there is the QUANTITATIVE follow-up, when the invention grows all over the world and becomes part of everyday life.

The QUANTITATIVE thing is what is going ever faster - in earlier times it took time until an invention grew all over the world. Now, it's going fast.

KEY inventions, however, the QUALITIATIVE thing, is something else. We can't even beat cancer.

The wueston is what the next key invention eill be. I suppose it will have to be something to solve the energy nd resource problems, otherwise, we'll just drop back to steam engine times.

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Mamgaeater
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posted June 13, 2009 10:41 PM
Edited by Mamgaeater at 02:05, 14 Jun 2009.

Quantity in extremely large amounts = quality.

if you generate random code enough you will eventually make a usable code.

edit: never mind i understand what jollyjoker is getting at.
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JollyJoker
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posted June 13, 2009 10:51 PM

Nope. Not so. You can put as many pcs on the Pi or any other problem, they will never ever find the right value. That's QUALITY:

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TheDeath
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posted June 14, 2009 12:06 AM

Quote:
At the moment I can't decide which is more disturbing: this theory or that there are people who support it.
Hey I am a supporter and I find that insulting! (j/k)

In all seriousness, I know why you take issue, and it is my mention in the other threads where I talked about AIs about stubbornness, but this stubbornness is only related to how we treat others. Mind you, Aliens would be identical in this case to AIs. The only difference is that we create AIs, and thus as selfish species, we want to make them slaves.

I find it pretty ironic that people dare to call God a tyrant or unloving, when whatever WE create ends up as slavery or at least we expect that. How tyrannical is THAT?

On topic, I think that we, humans, have these flaws that render us very much like a virus: because all we do, to our benefit. (mvass do NOT start, read more and you'll understand). BUT, and that's a big but, we aren't totally selfish, not all of us anyway. We actually only care about our own children, in this regard, and rarely do it for our benefit, but more like for our children's benefit.

This doesn't cut it. It still makes us selfish and arrogant species. Why do people think that AIs are bad if they attack us? OF COURSE they would do it -- what would YOU do, or a child do, if his/her parents made him/her a slave? You would just do it and obey them? Really?

Most humans make me sick. Sadly, those most end up in power
That's what I hope singularity changes. This isn't about AIs as much as it is about changing humanity. That's why I'm a supporter

Quote:
If we look at windows vista...
ROFLMAO Dagoth Vista is a pure failure technically wise, except the more stable kernel... The irony is that MS was never good at it either -- if you think that XP is a very good OS, that is only because of the HUGE support it got from OTHERS and even hardware vendors.

90% of XP's popularity and all-around OS is NOT due to Microsoft for the most part. They even tried to kill it (and postponed it, cause people just love it for some reason -- and by people again, I mean also hardware vendors and developers etc)

Quote:
Nope. Not so. You can put as many pcs on the Pi or any other problem, they will never ever find the right value. That's QUALITY:
Putting 2 CPU's in parallel, and using a parallel algorithm (kinda complex for Pi but it does exist in supercomputers) you will compute it almost twice as fast...

I forgot exactly how far we computed Pi yet, but I think it is in millions of digits range (not sure if billions yet, don't remember). But who the hell needs so much precision LMAO? That's where some supercomputers are wasted
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JollyJoker
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posted June 14, 2009 12:14 AM
Edited by JollyJoker at 00:16, 14 Jun 2009.

Quote:


Quote:
Nope. Not so. You can put as many pcs on the Pi or any other problem, they will never ever find the right value. That's QUALITY:
Putting 2 CPU's in parallel, and using a parallel algorithm (kinda complex for Pi but it does exist in supercomputers) you will compute it almost twice as fast...

I forgot exactly how far we computed Pi yet, but I think it is in millions of digits range (not sure if billions yet, don't remember). But who the hell needs so much precision LMAO? That's where some supercomputers are wasted


That looks like you wouldn't even grasp the difference. It's not a question of precision - or quantity.
You know, Pythagoras was WRONG. You cannot reduce everything to a relation of two integers. The world is a whole fraking dimension more complicated than that.

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mvassilev
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posted June 14, 2009 12:20 AM

Quote:
The only difference is that we create AIs, and thus as selfish species, we want to make them slaves.
We create hammers, and thus as selfish species, we want to make them our slaves.
In a thousand years, Black &  Decker will be seen as slave traders.
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TheDeath
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posted June 14, 2009 12:36 AM
Edited by TheDeath at 00:42, 14 Jun 2009.

Quote:
That looks like you wouldn't even grasp the difference. It's not a question of precision - or quantity.
You know, Pythagoras was WRONG. You cannot reduce everything to a relation of two integers. The world is a whole fraking dimension more complicated than that.
With all honesty I think I'm at a loss by what you mean by "Pi" then, because all I know about it, is that it's the ratio (a number) between the circumference of the circle to its diameter.

Quote:
Quote:
The only difference is that we create AIs, and thus as selfish species, we want to make them slaves.
We create hammers, and thus as selfish species, we want to make them our slaves.
In a thousand years, Black &  Decker will be seen as slave traders.
This would turn into a very different discussion, one of will and life, which would be complicated to go into (and frankly I can't go into it, don't have the time -- sometimes I feel like I should write my blog so I can only write something once and then post links wherever someone asks me...). However I would like to be presented with an argument against the 'will' or 'life' of those hypothetical (at least for now) AIs first.

No one, except with some "soul", is able to explain it. And who the hell said you should only appreciate things with a soul, even if you are religious?

EDIT: Ok here's a small explanation. The important thing to notice is the disturbness factor (or something like that). Please note that in my viewpoint, disturbing static objects is still disturbance but with a less factor (or multiplier, whatever) because the reaction consequences are smaller -- a self-thinking entity will appreciate the response you give, and will analyze it, thus causing a deeper (not bigger, but deeper) reaction of disturbance (which is why it might get let's say, mad or fear or threatened or whatever, compared to a non-thinking machine that will kill you without caring). BUT that does NOT mean that static objects are non-disturbed, just by a much smaller range.

Blowing up the Moon for instance, would be VERY huge disturbance (not just the Moon itself but also its effects on the Earth, though the former is much deeper disturbance), even if it isn't alive. You may think otherwise, but at least I can explain it (and the hammer analogy) with my terms. You could go whatever you want but at least I would live in harmony.

Even if I may seem a bit restrictive or 'dictatorship' to stop humanity from doing all these "things", it wouldn't be tyranny or exploitation: because if I was a normal citizen and one of my clones was in power (without knowing about me -- in short, not treating me special or anything) I wouldn't have a problem, and neither would AIs probably (at least compared to the alternative where they would be slaves, or in war...)
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JollyJoker
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posted June 14, 2009 12:48 AM

Quote:
Quote:
That looks like you wouldn't even grasp the difference. It's not a question of precision - or quantity.
You know, Pythagoras was WRONG. You cannot reduce everything to a relation of two integers. The world is a whole fraking dimension more complicated than that.
With all honesty I think I'm at a loss by what you mean by "Pi" then, because all I know about it, is that it's the ratio (a number) between the circumference of the circle to its diameter.


Well, err. NO. Not the way you think it is.

C(ircumference)= D(iameter) x Pi.       Right.

So Pi= C/D, as you say.

But the problem is actually that people were not able to compute C. The problem is, if you know the diameter of a circle, then what's the circulference? People needed PI to tell that, not the other way round.
And you cannot express Pi as a ratio of two integers. So D is no integer either. That's the trouble.
But that's pretty basic mathematics.

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TheDeath
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posted June 14, 2009 12:52 AM

You can make D an integer, but that will make C irrational, not a problem since both are numbers (I never said only integers).

But yeah good point about not knowing C... I would say, you could either measure it (impossible to do it mathematically precise!), or use a shape with N sides, where N gets to infinity (more and more sides become a circle). That's how most algorithms are based these days (on computation of Pi).

Or you could go with trigonometric functions but then, radians are expressed in Pi so unless you use Taylor series, you're in trouble.. complicated stuff

but still a number, that was my point.
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friendofgunnar
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posted June 14, 2009 12:53 AM

Quote:

Thoughts?



Yes! I'm glad you asked. brb....

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TheDeath
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posted June 14, 2009 12:57 AM

By the way, regarding the "soul" thing (and religion arguments against AIs). I think that appreciating only things with a soul shows our true nature, that we are much more tyrannical or selfish than God. Like I have said before superiority is not the same as tyranny: one has servants, the other slaves. Souls are unique to humans, but God still loves us even if we are different (how He created us anyway, but we "create" AIs too). It would only show that, if God were like us, He would have made us slaves (maybe the angels too though I'm not sure).

People dare to call God unjust and unloving, but humans would likely want to enslave AIs, or a different creation than them. Who's the unloving tyrant here? Makes me sick.
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TheDeath
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posted June 14, 2009 02:27 AM

Just had to quote this from TA in case people didn't bother to read the interview:
Quote:
I see humanity dividing into two, maybe three major ideological camps. I call the people who will be opposed to building artilects “terrans”—they think humans are the number one priority. The second group are “cosmists”—they want to build artilects. They think it’s human destiny to progress to that next level, they will think normal human life is pathetic. We have racism now, but wait till you see speciesism. So you have at least two murderously opposed ideologies and they will be the new capitalism vs. communism for the 21st century.
ROFL so true!! (sorry mvass)
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