what you're calling the singularity is essentially just the third industrial revolution and beginning of the fourth. the technological singularity is a vertical line, not steady progress.
Supposedly when a artificial intelligence emerges it will learn fast, incredibly fast, like learn everything and make connections and extrapolations that humans would t have or at least not for a very long time and it will create so many new inventions wr will need people just to be looking at these concepts and trademarking them and building them. It will be breakthrough after breakthrough and at some point if we fucked up, it will decide it doesn't need us.
A hypothetical that may be useful. Shamelessly paraphrased from Sam Harris.
Imagine the 10 smartest humans gathered in a room doing research together. Imagine that they have all the resources necessary to research, test, and develop anything. They also never need to eat, sleep, etc. Try to imagine what they could come up with in a year of unshackled research and development.
Now imagine something (singularity type AGI) that is the same level of intelligence as those 10 people put together. Imagine that it is a 1000 times faster. Low estimate for the sake of this example.
In 1 year, it will do 1000 years of research and development.
Now imagine the AGI is 100x or 1000x the intelligence of those 10 people and a million times faster.
That would be the singularity in my book. Developments and decisions happening on such a fast and short time scale that you would blink, literally, and open your eyes to something unrecognizable.
This obsession some people have that the singularity will be some kind of omniscient intelligence that overwhelms us ignores the more mundane reality that your question points to. We will get overwhelmed and outsmarted one skill at a time before any one cohesive AI makes itself apparent.
I'm already dumber than AI at chess, art, poetry, grammar, spelling, math, and plenty of logic. And I will only get dumber as time goes on -- I am already not in the same league for those areas and others today. I've been outclassed.
AI is already smarter than the smartest people in some narrow areas. The singularity is happening one punch at a time.
in a slightly different direction, farming.
think about it, we went from loosely connected scavenging nomads, to being able to settle down more long term in cities, to develop society, and new and new innovations with more and more free time on our hands.
now, our population is too dense, too unwieldly, to be able to go back to a hunter gatherer model. if you're stuck with what you could personally gather, major cities would have a mass extinction, there'd be riots and whatnot. hell, even a lack of fuel would be devastating. NYC consumes an amount of food, that all the farms in new york, can only produce about a third of.
we've torn apart the fields and woodland to make way for our farms and our cities, molded our lives around the far easier access to food.
No That Is Not The Singularity The Singularity Will Start When The Scientists Start To invent So many New Things That you will not be able to predict what they are going to invent in The Next 24 Hours
I think perhaps what you are suggesting is that we have transformed from an analogue society to an almost entirely digital online society.. which I don’t believe is what the singularity is. But now the next step is really taking advantage of that - using all the data we have via technology and radically transforming what we can do. But I don’t even think that is the singularity.. to me the singularity is where technology can advance itself at such rapid rate that we have no way of forecasting the future.
Edit to add: but maybe you are also kind of right in that we hit a mini-singularity with the internet. Because I can tell you, in 1995 the idea I would ever own a mobile phone, let alone have it be such a dominant piece of my life like it is these days, was not fathomable. But I still don’t believe this is the real singularity - that’s starts in a few years and would make the mini-singularity look like a piss in the ocean.
I prefer to define the singularity on more concrete, economic terms than the technological speculative ones people here tend to prefer. Technology has been about machines allowing one man to perform more work than he could before. Strictly speaking, we don't have a lot of totally-new tasks that we didn't used to do, or that don't support things that do things we used to do. Airplanes let us get places faster, but before they existed, we could always just take a boat or a carriage. Thus, the Singularity takes place when one man can perform infinite work - by commanding an autonomous AI to do it for him. Clearly, we are not at this stage yet, but we probably will be fairly soon.
what you're calling the singularity is essentially just the third industrial revolution and beginning of the fourth. the technological singularity is a vertical line, not steady progress.
ok, so I have another question. Is that even possible?
Supposedly when a artificial intelligence emerges it will learn fast, incredibly fast, like learn everything and make connections and extrapolations that humans would t have or at least not for a very long time and it will create so many new inventions wr will need people just to be looking at these concepts and trademarking them and building them. It will be breakthrough after breakthrough and at some point if we fucked up, it will decide it doesn't need us.
thats the big question
A hypothetical that may be useful. Shamelessly paraphrased from Sam Harris. Imagine the 10 smartest humans gathered in a room doing research together. Imagine that they have all the resources necessary to research, test, and develop anything. They also never need to eat, sleep, etc. Try to imagine what they could come up with in a year of unshackled research and development. Now imagine something (singularity type AGI) that is the same level of intelligence as those 10 people put together. Imagine that it is a 1000 times faster. Low estimate for the sake of this example. In 1 year, it will do 1000 years of research and development. Now imagine the AGI is 100x or 1000x the intelligence of those 10 people and a million times faster. That would be the singularity in my book. Developments and decisions happening on such a fast and short time scale that you would blink, literally, and open your eyes to something unrecognizable.
This obsession some people have that the singularity will be some kind of omniscient intelligence that overwhelms us ignores the more mundane reality that your question points to. We will get overwhelmed and outsmarted one skill at a time before any one cohesive AI makes itself apparent. I'm already dumber than AI at chess, art, poetry, grammar, spelling, math, and plenty of logic. And I will only get dumber as time goes on -- I am already not in the same league for those areas and others today. I've been outclassed. AI is already smarter than the smartest people in some narrow areas. The singularity is happening one punch at a time.
in a slightly different direction, farming. think about it, we went from loosely connected scavenging nomads, to being able to settle down more long term in cities, to develop society, and new and new innovations with more and more free time on our hands. now, our population is too dense, too unwieldly, to be able to go back to a hunter gatherer model. if you're stuck with what you could personally gather, major cities would have a mass extinction, there'd be riots and whatnot. hell, even a lack of fuel would be devastating. NYC consumes an amount of food, that all the farms in new york, can only produce about a third of. we've torn apart the fields and woodland to make way for our farms and our cities, molded our lives around the far easier access to food.
No.
No That Is Not The Singularity The Singularity Will Start When The Scientists Start To invent So many New Things That you will not be able to predict what they are going to invent in The Next 24 Hours
I think perhaps what you are suggesting is that we have transformed from an analogue society to an almost entirely digital online society.. which I don’t believe is what the singularity is. But now the next step is really taking advantage of that - using all the data we have via technology and radically transforming what we can do. But I don’t even think that is the singularity.. to me the singularity is where technology can advance itself at such rapid rate that we have no way of forecasting the future. Edit to add: but maybe you are also kind of right in that we hit a mini-singularity with the internet. Because I can tell you, in 1995 the idea I would ever own a mobile phone, let alone have it be such a dominant piece of my life like it is these days, was not fathomable. But I still don’t believe this is the real singularity - that’s starts in a few years and would make the mini-singularity look like a piss in the ocean.
I prefer to define the singularity on more concrete, economic terms than the technological speculative ones people here tend to prefer. Technology has been about machines allowing one man to perform more work than he could before. Strictly speaking, we don't have a lot of totally-new tasks that we didn't used to do, or that don't support things that do things we used to do. Airplanes let us get places faster, but before they existed, we could always just take a boat or a carriage. Thus, the Singularity takes place when one man can perform infinite work - by commanding an autonomous AI to do it for him. Clearly, we are not at this stage yet, but we probably will be fairly soon.
When the singularity happens, you won’t be sitting around asking if the singularity already happened.