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Comment by ThomPete | Hacker News Reader

It is so sad that this very important discussion keep getting sidetracked by strawmen.

Anyone who can't explain how they at one side have no problem believing in evolution which took us from non-biological material into biological creatures who can think and create computers, but somehow have a problem believing evolution could continue via technology I have no interest listening to.

The reality is we don't know what happens but we do know that we are seeing more and more complexity in technology which via ex. the internet is following it's own network effects and is showing increasing capabilities of intelligent behavior.

Whether machines will be self-aware and push us toward the singularity or this increasing intelligence just become a danger by it's sheer computational power is mostly academic.

The fact is that the Singularity _can_ happen and we would be wise to think about how to deal with this.

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Fine, let's say the singularity could happen. How do you know what form it will take and thus how to prepare for it? We don't have any evidence or examples of artificial human intelligence or something beyond us. Everything we humans build falls apart, there is nothing remotely resembling self-perpetuation of any sort. Where is the evidence that tech can do this? This singularity talk sounds, at best, like imagining flying ships in the 14th century. It might happen. But we have a long, long way to go and we have no idea how it will work.

What evidence was there of humans before they were around?

We can see there is emerging complexity, we can see there is increasing ability to solve more and more complex tasks, we can see that machines can learn, we can see that they are able to work together in ever larger networks and across all devices, we can see that it's happening at an accelerating rate and we kind of know what exponential curves do, I don't see anything but evidence that this is a likely future scenario.

And unless you are saying it requires an intelligent designer to create intelligence which would make you religious I have a hard time understanding exactly what you are objecting to?

What we do know is that it's going to happen through technology and that's where we have the most ability to actually attempt to do something to steer this in the right direction.

In other words, since you don't have faith in God, you must have faith in technology even though there is no evidence that technology can bring forth creative, living intelligence.

I don't have faith in technology.

Technology exist I can see it, I can test it it's not metaphysical any more than the emerging complexity of biological life lead to us.

A very very different thing.

I'm not talking about faith in the existence of technology, but in the capability of technology to produce life. By ruling out the existence of God, the only logical explanation for life is that it's the result of physical processes, meaning the chances of creating artificial life are high. If God does exist and is the cause of life, the chances of creating artificial life are low. Eliminating the God hypothesis is what leads to an optimistic expectation of artificial life. Since there is no proof against the existence of God, technological optimism for the creation of life is an act of faith.

> And unless you are saying it requires an intelligent designer to create intelligence which would make you religious I have a hard time understanding exactly what you are objecting to?

Aren't the opponents of the belief in a technological singularity saying the precise opposite: that a designer can't possibly hope to mimic the effects of billions of years of biochemistry in reaching the little-understood goal of general intelligence in self-replicating organisms by designing computation machines and deciding on what outputs they'd like the evolutionary algorithm they've written to optimize for.

I am talking about the omnipotent/omniscient intelligent designer.

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