The Singularity in Our Past | Hacker News Reader

The Singularity in Our Past

cscs.umich.edu

62 pointsevgenit49 comments

Reading over the comments up to this point, this is a definition debate, not an intelligent conversation. By some useful readings of the word "singularity", they are indeed relative and there are several in our past, and quite likely several in our future. Looking back at the prognostications in 1980 one can fruitfully argue that we've been through one just since then. By other useful readings of the word "singularity", it lies solely in the future if it exists or can exist at all.

Arguing which definition is "true" is wrong; definitions can't really true or false, they are simply useful or not useful, nor do they have any direct impact on reality.

Confusions like this are the reason why I favor the intelligence explosion flavour of the singularity ( http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools ) -- there's no confusion as to whether we've already had one. The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it. The single most important part about the singularity is that the technology does improve on the intelligence that invented it.

The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.

I bet it led to a significant increase in the average IQ. It may not have been a Singularity with a capital S, but it certainly did reflect back on its creators.

The qualitative and quantitative improvements from the flynn effect and the population increase reflected back on humanity as a whole, not the creators of the industrial revolution. This is why we've got accelerating growth, but it's also why the second derivative is still small.

I agree, but this is orthogonal to the point I was trying to address. mechanical_fish, in a cousin thread, is talking about the same thing I was.

Perhaps the scientific revolution was not an innovation of a single person, but of the collective entity formed by the proto-scientists of civilization. That conceptual advance, along with communication, tool, and other conceptual advances since that time, have continued to accelerate civilization's collective intelligence.

We don't expect the singularity to improve the intelligence of transistors. Perhaps it is unreasonable to expect that previous intelligence explosions of a collective being massively improved the intelligence of the humans comprising it.

The industrial revolution, while revolutionary, did not improve on the intelligence that invented it.

...typed the person into his quantum-mechanically-mediated instantaneous conversation with ten thousand of the best-educated technologists on Earth.

You're going to have trouble convincing me that Google doesn't make me more intelligent. You're also going to have trouble convincing me that, say, cheap printing and cheap food -- both products of the industrial revolution, and without which I might be a subsistence farmer -- do not make me more intelligent. I wouldn't know quantum mechanics without them, after all, so I wouldn't understand how computers work.

And if you strive to define "intelligence" such that human intelligence has not been improved by technology -- which can be done; I'm clearly less intelligent than my Cro-Magnon ancestors by many criteria -- you are going to have a hard time convincing me that the future will be any different. If technology hasn't worked to improve "intelligence" before, why should it do so later?

A Google engineer should not expect to get a helpful response when he asks the Google search engine for advice on building a better Google.

> A Google engineer should not expect to get a helpful response when he asks the Google search engine for advice on building a better Google.

Why not?

Google does a lot of things right, but they don't have all the smart people.

Not to forget that IQ tests (for whatever they may actually measure) had to be constantly rescaled over the last half century to stay centered at 100. So an average IQ these days is comparable to a borderline genius IQ from the middle of the 20th century.

Edit: it's called the Flynn effect, and if this phone had decent copy and paste, I'd give you the wikipedia link, which you now are forced to find on your own. But at least I can rest reasonably assured that your general intelligence is sufficient for solving that task ;-).

> ...typed the person into his quantum-mechanically-mediated instantaneous conversation with ten thousand of the best-educated technologists on Earth.

Are you referring to HN?

Yes and no. HN is the proximate host of the conversation. But HN is linkable and indexed by Google, so if you make a sufficiently interesting comment it really does have the potential to be read by everyone with an Internet connection and a reading knowledge of the language it is in.

In Henery Adams's audio biography 'The Education of Henry Adams'http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Education_of_Henry_Adams (i.e. Henery Adams the grandson of John Quincy Adams was a 19'th century historian). He discusses his theory of history. In his model history is driven by the law of Acceleration which discribes the exponential growth of energy consumption through the 19'th century http://www.bartleby.com/159/34.html. Exponential growth in energy consumption was viewed as unsustainable as early as the 1860's but Henry Adams noted that it continued throughout his life up until the time he wrote his biography in 1904 and he saw no end to it.

> Exponential growth in energy consumption was viewed as unsustainable as early as the 1860's but Henry Adams noted that it continued throughout his life up until the time he wrote his biography in 1904 and he saw no end to it.

We're seeing it now, however.

The point of the story above is that people in Henry's time were seeing it too - and yet it didn't happen.

They were seeing it as not sustainable, while we're actually seeing the first hiccups. As you may now know, finally the EIA admitted in its latest report that peak oil already occurred :

http://www.iea.org/w/bookshop/add.aspx?id=422

quote :"If governments put in place the energy and climate policies to which they have committed themselves, then our analysis suggests that crude oil production has probably already peaked."

Of course this didn't make the news. Keep on the denial, people.

Careful with your assumptions. Energy is nor equal to oil.

Of course it isn't; however it represents the better part of our energy consumption, and we face an unknown : moving from one main source of energy to an inferior one (in the past, we always went from one source to a better one).

Who cares about oil? Oil is important for moving vehicles, but not so much for global energy consumption, like say, electricity.

Yeah sure. Oil makes up 38% of global energy consumption. Fossil fuels makes about 80% of global energy consumption. Electricity is NOT a primary energy source, and basically you don't know what you're talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_Worldwide_Energy_Sour...

Sorry, I should have made myself more clear: Oil is the most useful thing for driving vehicles. Apart from that, we have good substitutes for all other energy use cases, like generating electricity.

Coal and nuclear power can last for quite some time. See `Sustainable Energy without the hot air' for some numbers. (It's available online.)

We don't have the necessary capacity of say nuclear reactors ready at the moment. But that's an inconvenience of a few years at most. (Thanks for the link!)

There may be peak oil, but no reason for peak energy.

At the current building rate, we'll have soon less nuclear reactors. Even with a huge building effort it very much looks like nuclear will remain more or less as is.

Then there isn't that much U 235. We'll need thorium or fusion...

The coal outlook is very unclear. Some reliable sources says it will peak in 2025, 2050, 2100 or 2150. Then we'll have much EROI because of the necessity to capture CO2.

From what I know, we'll use much less energy quite soon individually, and not much more than we do nowadays globally.

Thorium, fusion or fast breeders. The biggest cost of current nuclear fission reactors is in the initial capital outlay (and regulatory uncertainty). The price of Uran is low; if the price would go up, more reserves would surely be found.

I agree, that using coal on a large scale isn't a good idea. (That includes the current scale.)

I agree with all the actuals / current data with you. I just don't see that we will need to use less energy in the long run.

> I just don't see that we will need to use less energy in the long run.

I don't think we'll really have the choice :) It looks like thorium is at least 20 to 30 years away, and fusion... 50, 100 years, who knows ?

People seem to underestimate how much engineering will be required for intelligence to interact with the environment successfully. My dog might not be as "intelligent" as me, but he knows a lot more than I do when it comes to information gained through hearing, taste and smell. He has better engineering in many respects. Almost any life form beats me in "intelligence" if you define the test right.

There are already theories about how to build universal AI algorithms (check out Marcus Hutter's stuff at http://www.hutter1.net/). These theories are quite an accomplishment, no doubt. But they boil the problem down to one involving sequence prediction. Let's say that particular form of the problem is now "solved". OK now what sequences would you like to present to the algorithm for training? Ones from the environment? Great, but those will take time to collect. Simulated ones? It takes a lot of knowledge to generate good ones.

For these reasons, I suspect the Singularity is safe from us for while.

> OK now what sequences would you like to present to the algorithm for training? Ones from the environment? Great, but those will take time to collect. Simulated ones? It takes a lot of knowledge to generate good ones.

With AIXI and variants, since they are universal predictors, it doesn't really matter what sequences you supply so long as they have some connection. Heck, just your algorithm access to an email server or something.

| Heck, just your algorithm access to an email server or something.

Then my dog will find the bone faster than AIXI. See what I mean?

The computable versions of AIXI have such enormous constant factors that the indirection of email->real-world is as less than a grain of dust in the Ganges.

That indirection's constant factor cost might matter for any feasible AIXI-inspired AI, but since none has yet to be created or even designed, it's hard to say...

In order to move this away from debate about semantics I think this meshes nicely with an alternative view of intelligence. Specifically Human intelligence as a social endeavour rather than an individual struggle.

If you look at intelligence in that light we have gone through a huge transformation with the printing press, industrial revolution and now internet revolution.

Basically if you think of it as each human brain just being a small component able to try out new ideas then spread those ideas... Well that massive human spanning brain is undergoing massive ongoing upgrades in memory capacity and speed of communication.

The idea is that the Singularity would be a point in time where the totality of human expert knowledge would be insufficient to comprehend what an AI (or an AI-designed AI) would be capable of comprehending.

If we think human-level AI is possible, then superhuman AI would also be possible. Note, though, that while not infinite, human cognition is complete, that is, a human or group of humans is only limited by time or resources. No matter how much time we have; a dog will never stumble upon quantum mechanics. But given enough time, a human being can construct an expert knowledge repository, even though he himself is unable to understand some of the intermediary steps or details.

Now, this is where Singularity takes a turn to religion. Some people believe "it" to a future AI with enough physical means to be indistinguishable from a god. Not just a god, but one single God.

The idea is that the Singularity is whatever version of "in the future things will be different" that a given author thinks will get them an audience.

>a dog will never stumble upon quantum mechanics

i'm always amazed by such blatant anthropo-glorifing-centric statements which imply as obvious facts the doubtful things like this:

- that dog's brain has much less processing power. The sheer size difference is many times adjusted by efficiency difference (where human's one is less efficient)

- that quantum mechanics is a super-achievement, replication of which is a mark of higher intelligence. To me the ugliness of QM is bordering on a shame for human intelligence.

Why is quantum mechanics ugly?

The wavefunction collapse in the Copenhagen interpretation is ugly. Many-worlds is elegant, as long as you're willing to accept googols of unobservable near-duplicates of yourself.

>The wavefunction collapse in the Copenhagen interpretation is ugly

thank you. i thought i'm alone here. Personally to me this one is an example of the broader method of accepting postulates as-is. It is an ugly shame that makes science into religion.

Another one is doubling-down on dimensions and adding one more on top of it :) I mean it looks pretty logical and reasonably motivated, yet not everything true that is logical. "The sleep of reason produces monsters". Well, active work of human reason seems to produce even bigger monsters :)

I'm always amazed by such blatant anthropo-deprecating-centric (?) statements.

-The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something, like astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities and the ability to speak and write.

-The ugliness (read; complexity) of QM could easily be interpreted as a tribute. Whether you like it or not, it is the best we have. To paraphrase HHG2G, if it's ugly, then it's the universe that got it wrong, not us. (I'm partially joking, mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty.)

I mean, I'm all for a little humbling perspective. We are a race of people descended from stupider people unto apehood (and before that, lizards!) that are stuck on a rock in a universe fantastically larger than us.

That doesn't mean we should be debbie downers.

>The difference in efficiency should tell you that that power spent is _worth_ something

nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.

>astonishingly superior abstraction capabilities

yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc... The astonishing ability of our brain to generate various abstract reasons to kill. This ability is the only qualitative difference between humans and animals. Most people aren't able to handle beyond the simplest physics and mathematics reasoning, yet easy to come up with a set of "other" people and pretty abstract reasons why these "others" should be violently oppressed and killed. The ability to handle mathematics and physics is just a side-effect that is manifested only by a few. If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed, and whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.

> and the ability to speak and write

tools to help communicate and organize around the above mentioned main human ability to come up with reasons to and actually perform the killings.

>mostly because I don't suspect you really have a firm enough grasp of QM, let alone QFT, to determine its aesthetic beauty

I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp". It is not about aesthetic. It is about method and our level of understanding (or lack of it) that i consider ugly. Vs. complexity - where it is in QM? The mathematical machinery there is pretty simple compare to the state of the art in mathematics.

>nope. It is just that we didn't have strong enough competition from other predator species to force the efficiency increase. Instead we use the extensive way of increasing the size, even if it is accompanied by decreased efficiency. Like going cheap low-tech V8 instead of efficiently increasing horsepower of a V6 engine.

ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.

>yep. that one. The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...

like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.

>I have an MS in Math, and spent enough time on QM to get a "grasp".

In other words you are not a physicist. The saying that no one understands QM is not a joke. Mathematics is useless without reality; it's like literary analysis without story-telling.

I've been joking and condescending in my responses to you, but I'm going to get a little serious now:

>If you look into the history of human species, it is a continuous blood-shed

Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.

What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.

And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise? Maybe you don't, maybe you lump yourself in with us savages; if so, though, you must have some self-hatred issues that'll keep your therapist employed well beyond his retirement.

If all you see when you look at history is the pain, then all you will _feel_ is pain.

>ok, sure. point is our engine beats the pants off a dogs no matter how you slice it.

no. point is whenever we have even a little more biologically advanced brain, like Einstein's (noticeably smaller than typical human's one, yet more densely packed with more energy supplying cells), it easily beats typical human's one. The Einstein's brain is still human (had it been even a bit more biologically advanced than it was it would be hard to call it human), yet it shows how inefficient the typical human brain is.

>like I said, debbie downer. you have this absurd fixation on killings.

no, i just have an ability for analysis, and keen interest for QM and biology.

>Yes, it's continuous bloodshed. You know what? It's not your right to determine that what people fought for was meaningless, or too "violent" for your modern middle-class tastes. It's not your right to prissily look down on the human race from your ivory tower of Math and grumble about killing.

that is my point. Human brain has unique ability to put "meaning" into killings which aren't necessary for satisfaction of immediate food or self-defense needs.

>What I see when I look upon our history is a series of people taking their actions seriously. I see a series of people that slowly, agonizingly, painstakingly turned away from violence in order to serve those 'side-effects' that you think we killers disregard.

that agony is exactly manifestation of the fact that i talking about - mathematics and physics aren't natural for human brain. Reasoning for violence is.

>And that's the crux of it. Do you really think you're any better than the killers you despise?

i'm human. I'm a specimen of a species which evolved as a pack hunting predator. It has beaten all other predators (including other species of humans) through evolutionary advantage of extensively evolved brain which improved pack hunting (through communication/organization and weapons - thanks to the ape's ability to grasp a stick or stone) at the start and later discovered that unmotivated aggression, ie. striking first without being in immediate danger, toward others predators is evolutionary advantageous if you have much better communication/organization and weapons.

Like any other human, i have ideas when i think violence is justified even though it wouldn't serve my immediate food or self-defense needs. Like any other human, i'd like to mislead myself into thinking that my reasons for violence are "valid and justified". Well, i have a human brain.

> The top manifestations of that ability were Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin, etc...

You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.

> whenever there is a patch of technological progress it is most visibly expressed through new technological means of violence.

And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.

>You may consider them the "top manifestations". I don't think many other people would. For my part, I'd put Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss higher up than Hitler on a list of top manifestations of the capacity for abstract thought.

you don't get it. Bach and Shakespeare and Newton and Gauss were just 4 people. Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot were just leaders of millions. These millions were expressing and implementing abstract ideas who should be killed by doing actual killing. So, lets put it in easy way for you to understand - the top manifestations (number of people involved, total effort they put into it, including the ability for abstract thinking) are Inquisition, WWI, WWII, Khmer Rouge, ...

>And yet today the world -- especially the industrialized, wealthy parts of the world, which have benefited most from a sustained application of that ability for abstract thought -- is less violent and longer-lived than ever before.

this would sound so true right before WWI, and before WWII as well...

So "top manifestations" now turns out to mean "manifestations involving most people" and "Hitler" now turns out to mean "WW2 and the Holocaust". Well, fair enough.

Now, why exactly should WW2-and-the-holocaust be regarded as a "top manifestation" of the capacity for abstract thought? I mean, sure, lots of people and lots of effort were involved, but that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world -- with WW2-and-the-holocaust as a single item. If we take, say, "medicine" as a single item (which seems to me just as reasonable) then the number of people involved is very much larger, the net change in utility probably also much larger, and the amount of abstract thought involved also much larger.

In any case, why focus on single events? Imagine something that has the following consequences. (1) Two events, in each of which 1000 people die premature and nasty deaths. (2) A sustained change lasting for ten years, as a result of which 100000 people (independently, on separate occasions) avoid premature and nasty deaths. Then if you focus on "top manifestations" you might say that the top two are those two events in which people die. But the net benefit -- which surely matters more -- is large and positive. (Note for the avoidance of doubt: I am not making any pronouncement on whether bringing this thing about would be morally justified, which is an entirely different question from whether on balance it's a good thing. No person brought about the human capacity for abstract thought.)

>that's just an artefact of the way you happen to have chosen to carve up the world ... >In any case, why focus on single events?

I just picked these noticeable acute periods from the _continuous_ history of human violence as mere illustrative examples.

While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied to what group of other people, and as result they either directly participate or support violence performed on their behalf. So in my view, major combined reasoning activity of human species brains, ie. performed activity integrated over participants (think "top" command), is the reasoning supporting the various acts of violence.

Vs. the actual consequences - my numbers look differently than yours. May be one Einstein or Mozart resulted in even more lives saved than medicine. It doesn't change the fact that for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

An the reason being here is that human species got evolutionary advantage by being able to strike first with overwhelming power. Lions don't try to exterminate hyenas and hyenas doesn't try to exterminate lions. They peacefully coexist until paths of specific lions and hyenas cross over specific zebra. Humans are unique in their ability to reason that exterminating others they would potentially have more zebras to themselves and that the "others" may have the same reasoning, and thus "either we or they". Thus we have, again just for mere example, tutsi and hutu.

> While only few practice medicine, majority of the people do have ideas about what "valid and just" violence can be applied [...]

Double standard. Most people also have ideas about medicine, if only to the extent that they have beliefs about what is and isn't good for their health. An apples-to-apples comparison would be, say, the number of medical professionals versus the number of military professionals. The country where I live (the UK) has, compared with other broadly similar nations, more military and fewer medical professionals, but it still seems to have more of the latter.

> for each hour of Mozart's brain developing music there are several orders of magnitude more hours cumulatively spent by others at the same time reasoning for violence.

It's the same double standard again! Either compare the time spent by Mozart on music with the time spent by, say, Hitler on "reasoning for violence"; or compare the time spent by everyone on music with the time spent by everyone on "reasoning for violence".

Anyway, I think this is becoming less and less productive (and also less interesting to others, if I can judge from the fact that no one seems to be voting us either up or down) so I suggest we leave it here.

I'm thinking it's more about the evolution of technology. Just because we've had the resources and knowledge to consider ourselves (or even society itself) in a "singularity" doesn't mean it's manifest physically yet. I think quantum computing and the ever-expanding OAuth connections we're seeing will help to bring everybody, literally, closer. Within the next few years I can realistically see a direct connection to a technological singularity. From there I can't even imagine what life on Earth will be like

...ever-expanding OAuth connections...

Uh, what? How does OAuth have anything to do with the singularity?

How will we know the singularity is here unless we can authenticate its identity?

while human species may be focused on Singularity as a technological event, there is another extremely significant possibility - emergence of human species v2.0, split from inside the current v1.0. It may be helped/facilitated (or may be not) by the technologies - computer, material and/or bio-genetical.

The technological singularity, Skynet style, is possibly just crutches for the human v1.0 where is v2.0 may possibly just skip this step.

Ahahaha, life lessons from someone who thinks Dexter is worthy of intellectual consideration.

And who gives The Republic serious consideration for the present?...Oh i see you're speaking in Ann Arbour tomorrow, of course you do, just like that "The Republic Is America and The Republic Is Awesome" lecture that is taught in full seriousness in the Yale online courses...now it makes sense, the delusions of apparently omnipotent wealth.

So much high school lovin tonight, what's up pups?!

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