The Singularity

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wallaby

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i recently read the book 'singularity Sky' by Charles Stross which lead me to investigate the ideas behind a technological singularity.

do you think the creation of any artificialy intelligent being could accelerate the rate of technological advancement beyond the level of prediction?

if so what do you think the consequences could be?
 
wallaby said:
do you think the creation of any artificialy intelligent being could accelerate the rate of technological advancement beyond the level of prediction?
Click to expand...
Any? Possibly.
wallaby said:
if so what do you think the consequences could be?
Click to expand...
"Beyond the level of prediction" I would guess :D
 
i admit that i'm contradicting myself here but taking a guess what might happen to a society where for instance anything was possible. would governments collapse, would we survive.

or what might happen to humans as a result of higher and higher inteligences constantly coming into creation.

i realise that this is a contradictory and pointless thread but come on take a guess.
 
the higher intelligences destroy mankind to make way for their new Holovision sets to watch their excellent sitcoms about how tough life is being a hyper-intelligent artificial entity almost accidently creating by humans.

Really, how can we know what an A.I. would want to do?
 
Y'know, I always kind of wondered about this. Our whole experience with consciousness has been limited to one species in a biological paradigm. The Turing test might be great for assessing consciousness almost exactly like our own, but... Do we have a universal definition for consciousness; would we be able to recognize consciousness if it came along? In all the movies I've seen and books I've read, electronic consciousness is defined by subversion of human purposes. Is that really necessary? If the Internet, say, were a consciousness, would it gain more by playing along with humans or subverting them?

But maybe this should be in another thread.
 
Not at all. The Singularity is imagined to be a point in time at which change caused by technological advance (particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, but not confined to that field) makes the future practically incomprehensible and unpredictable.
But in order to consider this event (which may not be a single point in time after all, rather a gradual change) we would need to consider any and all possible advances, developments, and changes.

Artificially intelligent programs might emulate humans to a greater or lesser extemnt, but theymight be entirely different in quality; smart search engines, financial investment programs, traffic control systems, electronic point of sale systems personal planners, house management programs could all increase in sophistication until they display a wide range of emergent behaviour; they might be designed to interact with one another 9or develop that ability) and a community of AI systems could emerge almost before we know it. This community might have little in common with ordinary human mentalities but may become very sophisticated.
I hope that the human inhabitants of this possible future world will be able to remain in control of this strange new world; if so it would be just the beginning.
(there might even be several successive singularity events of one kind or another)...
 
the crux of the issue,
as i see it,
is the question of whether
human functioning;-
*intelligence* (hopefully),
follows formal, if as-yet unelucidated
patterns. If so, differences between traffic lights and people,
-algorithms and entities-
are matters of degree, rather than...
if there is something 'more'
to human behavior...
-to life-
and if so...
 
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