The Singularity - Official Thread

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
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Ozzie guy
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Ozzie guy »

I think in 2022 we have gone from no one in the singularity community really believing human level AI is near with some people sort of vaguely stating 2029 (and not really believing it) due to Kurzweils prediction. The general public thought the singularity was a joke worth laughing at.

To now majority of people in the singularity community thinking human level AI is near and AI touching the outskirts of the mainstream with some people worried and artists rightfully panicking (although not due to AGI).
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Yuli Ban
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 7:58 am
Interesting summary, although I doubt we're that close to the Singularity.
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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Personally, I think we are. I think AGI shouldn't be further out than 2024-2025.

The issue is that we've built up in our heads what the Singularity "ought" to be for decades. As I've said before, our brains approximate reality well enough that we think that our imagination is a good replacement for reality, when reality is full of limits, diminishing returns, and mundanity.

Whenever we imagined the Singularity, it was basically "artificial superintelligence becomes self-aware, magically starts manipulating the world around it with pseudo-psychokinesis, the world becomes an ecumenopolis with nothing but futuristic cityscapes and flying cars, humans begin uploading to computers en masse, a Dyson Swarm begins construction around the sun" and whatnot.

Plus we put all of it out to 2045 (at the earliest) so that gave us wiggle room to imagine that society would undergo transformations long before the Singularity occurs. I mean, that's only 22 years away. 22 years ago was 2001. Yet thinking about the future is a difficult and abstract exercise precisely because we're very keen on changing literally everything with no regards to reality, hence why predictions further out than 50 years are pure science fiction pretty much as far back as the 1800s, and before people started expecting the future to be more technologically advanced, people expected the distant future to be more apocalyptic instead.

We were expecting the Singularity to come in an age when we were already operating space colonies, playing with advanced transhumanism, and creating nanofactories, basically a world of technophilic dreams before we even reach ASI. Not a world where "big dams and public transit terminals" are still major predictions or where people are still buying vinyl records.

We are also often very ignorant to people outside our typical circle. This is something I've had to grapple with extensively in the past two months, about how completely Singularitarians and transhumanists totally and utterly fail to read the room and realize that 95% of people are not Singularitarians or transhumanists and have no interest in invasive technologies or merging with superintelligences. Even when these types do consider it, they pigeonhole this population into being a minority of red-cap wearing Christian Luddite farmers and not the literal billions of people with a wide and diverse range of beliefs and opinions that generally align along "Do not put microchips and augmentations in my body."

It's funny because I myself have talked about this in the past but never realized this discrepancy. I often talked about how "Average Joe" is 10+ years in the past and doesn't concern himself with the esoteric technologies we regularly discuss, and somehow I never put 2 and 2 together to realize Average Joe is the overwhelming majority of people.

And this goes 50x moreso considering the fact that AGI is likely coming within the next few years. Because again, we are cripplingly terrible at thinking about the wider world and very human reactions to things (we desperately want to assume idealistic reactions), which means that we have quite literally billions of people from the Silent Generation, Baby Boomer Generation, and Generation X who are notoriously technophobic still kicking when AGI comes online. And this isn't bringing up the Millennials who are skeptical of technological solutions to everything and Zoomers who have a complicated relationship with technology. Quite literally the only generation that might embrace transhumanism wholeheartedly is Generation Alpha, who are literally still kids, and one of the smallest generations in recent memory at that.

We are expecting these ultra-futuristic cityscapes and mega-upload facilities in a time when loads of people actively want to rewild the planet, move out of the cities, and generally pursue more serene lives. Like the whole trend of people moving into cities? The pandemic and remote work showed us that, if we were given the choice, people would actually prefer suburbs. Cities only grew because of economic opportunities there being better than what countrysides could offer. If AGI erases those opportunities, it now becomes stupefyingly obvious that the urbanization trend might actually start to reverse in some places, which is the complete opposite of what we expect out of the Singularity. And that's just one of many "epiphanies" I've been having about what the actual effect of AGI and the Singularity are going to have.

This is part of why I've come to greatly shift my expectations for the near future.

We say that the Singularity is going to be a point where technological progress is happening so rapidly that humans can't keep up, and so we'll have to augment ourselves to stay ahead of the game.

Now that we're close, I have to ask, "What if, crazy thought, most people just stop paying attention? If AI takes all jobs, what reason do 95% of people have to augment themselves anyway? There's no way we're keeping up with a superintelligence. There's no reason 95% of people even want to keep up with one. It's only a bunch of techies and futurists who even care about the rate of technological progress in the first place. And if, for whatever reason, the rate of progress becomes too fast and too uncontrollable, why would people choose to do the extremely alien action of merging with a superintelligence instead of the extremely human and obvious action of retracting into Antemillennialist communities where things go by slower in our daily lives?"


It comes as no surprise to me to learn that a lot of tech-bros and Silicon Valley Singularitarians also happen to be severely socially awkward nerds who genuinely, actually never considered any of this and assumed that mass acceptance of uncontrollable change, mass-augmentation, and mass transhumanism was just logical.

I think the Singularity is coming, but I think that the people on our board and other futurist boards who are expecting it to be this within five years:
Image
... are going to be disappointed.
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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Yuli Ban
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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Yes, I am a 28-year-old Boomer, how'd you know?
And remember my friend, future events such as these will affect you in the future
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ººº
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

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Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 12:33 pm Yes, I am a 28-year-old Boomer, how'd you know?
I meant it in a "I just wanna grill for God's sake".
Last edited by ººº on Mon Mar 13, 2023 12:05 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Cyber_Rebel »

Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 10:02 am I think the Singularity is coming, but I think that the people on our board and other futurist boards who are expecting it to be this within five years:
Image
... are going to be disappointed.
What about having that in certain localized communities/cities for those who want it? If people wish to "opt-out" as it were in regard to the singularity, then they should have the option to do so. But, if I wish to benefit from the technological advancements, via augmentations, living under A.I. guidance, etc... then I should also have the right to do so. I can see how this can create a danger of having separate classes, or even eventually evolutionary paths depending on who adopts this technology and who doesn't, but I also don't want research and development to be stagnated because some prefer an easier to understand past.

So, what exactly happens to us or those who embrace the singularity wholeheartedly?
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