The Singularity - Official Thread

Talk about scientific and technological developments in the future
User avatar
Ken_J
Posts: 241
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 5:25 pm

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Ken_J »

singularity is an evolution, and as such is only observable in retrospect.

there isn't a single point where there was a pre human and the next person was a human. It happens through accumulations of differences and the boundary is fuzzy.

We will have life as we know it, life as we know it with some new features, life as we know it with a variety of new features, life as we know it with selection pressure eliminating some of the varieties that are less successful paths, a new way of being with a lot of legacy features of the previous paradigm that hold on and encumber things, a less encumbered new way of being with a lot of features held onto out of tradition, the new way of being coming into it's own while we still cling to the idea that we are still fundamentally ourselves, and then gradually into just the new way of being with nostalgia for who we once were, and then the day where we stop being who we once were.

The future will look back at who we are and see a different people from themselves, but the transition will be unobservable while it happens. And you won't every really be able to point at a time or and event and say "that it, that's the point where everything stopped being then and became now."
Nanotechandmorefuture
Posts: 478
Joined: Fri Sep 17, 2021 6:15 pm
Location: At the moment Miami, FL

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Nanotechandmorefuture »

weatheriscool wrote: Thu Apr 20, 2023 2:36 am Quote
I see the Neuralink one and pass on that. Nanobots have been in use way before 2060 so unless these are brand new ones with some awesome flairs and cool stuff like Wolverine from X-Men style regeneration then for public it may be a surprise then.

The one thing I can see how being cyborg style even a little bit is for longevity. The ability to use a brain computer interface to take a brand new designed body grown from designer baby and use that as your new body will be a new possibility to longevity. It would be quite freaky and Invasion of the Body Snatchers style though if you have the funds for such a possible transfer to a new body of your choosing why not? Anything chip or BCI related and brain will have to wait as I'm sure the rest of the population will do because all sorts of harmful negative people would love to use that to have the population controlled just because. I see that as pretty counterproductive when space travel and Kardashev style civilizations can be achieved. Until some rights are established with the dang brain related stuff that will not be accepted not even by the younger generation. The possibilities are there to achieve far greater things while having video game levels of not worrying about time but unfortunately there are still some problems with humanity that need to be worked through before more awesome stuff is achieved. Think of the passage of time for some events to occur from now to 2100 and imagine if time never affected you? Would you stress over some things or small mistakes when you know humanity is working on amazing things? I would not.
User avatar
wjfox
Site Admin
Posts: 8733
Joined: Sat May 15, 2021 6:09 pm
Location: London, UK
Contact:

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by wjfox »

Karl Rock
Posts: 10
Joined: Tue Jan 31, 2023 2:26 am

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Karl Rock »

Yuli Ban wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 10:02 am 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.
For the cities part, Actually i think this depends on the city or country you live in.

The trend in most of the world will be towards denser super cities and taller buildings. Cities such as these already exist, just look at Shenzhen, Congqing and Dubai. However, it's unlikely the US will abandon suburbia anytime soon. In my city, in central Brazil, we are already seeing the city getting taller and taller and the skyline looking more and more like this. When i was a child we didn't have so many tall buildings.
User avatar
Powers
Posts: 682
Joined: Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:32 pm

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Powers »

Cyber_Rebel wrote: Sun Mar 12, 2023 10:00 pm
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?
User avatar
Ozzie guy
Posts: 486
Joined: Sun May 16, 2021 4:40 pm

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Ozzie guy »

Something I have probably never seen talked about but I think people will agree with is "I don't want to be smart".

I am convinced life won't be fun if you have super human level IQ, it will also feel like you are not yourself and an unearned reward like when someone wins the lottery and blows the money.

I also think when living in FIVR scenarios you will REALLY WISH you had a backup copy of your unenhanced brain so you are your own dumb self in FIVR worlds. Said worlds also open up the opportunity to have changing your brain fitting the story or a game mechanic where you can work hard to increase your IQ and it will feel like you are still you and it was deserved.
User avatar
Cyber_Rebel
Posts: 331
Joined: Sat Aug 14, 2021 10:59 pm
Location: New Dystopios

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Cyber_Rebel »

Ozzie guy wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 2:14 am Something I have probably never seen talked about but I think people will agree with is "I don't want to be smart".
Literally who says this? I think it's worth mentioning that having high IQ or whatever possible genetics means that you have the potential to be intelligent, but the knowledge itself doesn't just magically appear within your brain. (At least not yet anyways)

Is life really only "fun" if you're a moron? There's the idea that people who are extremely intelligent are bored with life, but I think that's a sort of anti-intellectualism that's very dated. Higher predisposition to learning capability, critical thinking, problem solving skills, can open up a lot of creative potential as well.

There are also many cases where "smart" people still do really dumb shit, so it's pretty relative since we're all still human.
User avatar
Powers
Posts: 682
Joined: Fri Apr 07, 2023 7:32 pm

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Powers »

I will be long dead before that is achievable.
Vakanai
Posts: 313
Joined: Thu Apr 28, 2022 10:23 pm

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by Vakanai »

Cyber_Rebel wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 5:53 am
Ozzie guy wrote: Tue May 09, 2023 2:14 am Something I have probably never seen talked about but I think people will agree with is "I don't want to be smart".
Literally who says this? I think it's worth mentioning that having high IQ or whatever possible genetics means that you have the potential to be intelligent, but the knowledge itself doesn't just magically appear within your brain. (At least not yet anyways)

Is life really only "fun" if you're a moron? There's the idea that people who are extremely intelligent are bored with life, but I think that's a sort of anti-intellectualism that's very dated. Higher predisposition to learning capability, critical thinking, problem solving skills, can open up a lot of creative potential as well.

There are also many cases where "smart" people still do really dumb shit, so it's pretty relative since we're all still human.
The image appears in my head of an intellectual listening to classical music while sitting back end of the day to sip a glass of whine looking pleasantly content. Or of the intellectual enjoying a hot cup of coffee on an autumn at a quaint little coffee shop while listening to some original poetry during one of those poetry slam days. Or of an intellectual reading a good book just before bed. Smart people are just as capable of enjoying life as so called "dumb" people, and as our antidepressant dependent modern culture proves dumb people are just as likely to be seriously depressed as anyone else.
spryfusion
Posts: 394
Joined: Thu Aug 19, 2021 4:29 am

Re: The Singularity - Official Thread

Post by spryfusion »

Post Reply