What if an emerging super-intelligence doesn't need humans?
Sunday, September 5, 2004 3:45 PM

topics: artificial intelligence  anti-singularity 

What if an emerging super-intelligence doesn't need humans? Tongue-in-cheek observation about one of the prime risks of creating a machine super-intelligence.

The Evolution Will Be Mechanized
Wednesday, September 1, 2004 9:01 PM

topics: artificial intelligence  anti-singularity  society 
related posts

• Vingean Singularity
• Thoughts on the so called "singularity" and nationalistic arrogance.

The Evolution Will Be Mechanized. Bruce Sterling rant in Wired about/against the Singularity.

The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied, squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of progress and no sense of direction. We have no idea what we really want from our own lives or from society. And no Moore's law rising majestically on any 2-D graph is ever going make us magnificent or spiritual when we lack the will, vision, and appetite for spiritual magnificence.

While I can understand Sterling's cynicism about humanity, I believe the mistake he makes is in defining the Singularity as something transcendent, something "magnificent or spiritual." While any number of over-zealous proponents of transhuman technologies certainly envision the Singularity this way, this definition is rather far-afield of the original vision of the Singularity Vinge paints in his paper "The Coming Technological Singularity."

I prefer to define the Singularity in far more basic terms: a technology-mediated intelligence "runaway," after which the human life will be drastically changed. This could easily (perhaps more easily) mean human extinction as it does something "magnificent or spiritual."

Thoughts on the so called "singularity" and nationalistic arrogance.
Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:14 PM

topics: anti-singularity 
related posts

• The Evolution Will Be Mechanized

Thoughts on the so called "singularity" and nationalistic arrogance. Probably the most amazingly ill-informed rant against technological progress I've ever read. In short, according to this person, a Singularity is not only "perposterous" but politically incorrect, because it will only benefit "wealthy white American suburbanites." Someone needs to do some more reading...

Pope Condemns Unethical Science, Cloning (AP)
Sunday, August 29, 2004 9:10 PM

topics: ethics  society  anti-singularity 

Pope Condemns Unethical Science, Cloning (AP). The Church cautions against too rapid progress in science and technology.

Solving the Software Problem
Sunday, August 29, 2004 8:26 PM

topics: artificial intelligence  anti-singularity 

Solving the Software Problem. Chris Hanson's reply to questions from Brad Delong about the nature of the Singularity and issues regarding developing AI software. References Cyc and a decade old report on a visit to Cyc-West.