Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Wednesday, April 08, 2009

The Singularity Is Upon Us! (And I Feel Fine)


Back over in Michael Anissimov's neck of the woods, "Thomas" and then "Roko" have decided that they are doing God's work by broadcasting my many limitations:
Thomas: Superlatives are apparently doing much better than your French phylosophy.

“In just over a day, a powerful computer program accomplished a feat that took physicists centuries to complete: extrapolating the laws of motion from a pendulum’s swings.”

Roko: I love the whooshing sound reality makes as it rushes past Dale’s Rhetoric.

I guess I find it rather perplexing that anybody here would think I would find this development surprising, or that superlative futurologists see this sort of thing as a “vindication” of their faith-based perspective. Of course, for True Believers there are only vindications when all is said and done, after all.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but there is nothing about this development that is clarified by treating it as an episode in a narrative that will eventuate in a Robot God or any other superlative aspiration.

To the extent that what is wanted in this occasion is to ensure that results are trustworthy and security problems addressed and so on, you will forgive me if I say that pretending this is the embryo of a post-biological superintelligence rather than a complex piece of code directed to a complex task will make no contribution whatsoever to a single practical consideration that besets us.

And it probably wouldn’t hurt to remind you that there is nothing about assuming such a hackneyed comic-book science fictional vantage that would have put any of you people in a position to contribute to the creation of this program you are now crowing about as though your fanboy handwaving somehow brought it into being.

I suspect all this just means that Robot Cultists will indulge in pointless deranging sensationalism to the cost of sense as usual.

I will say that I have enjoyed the robotic predictability with which some of you are now expressing hostility for the effete elite French philosophy I so dastardly represent: anti-intellectual arguments from would-be sooper-intellectuals is par for the course where the futurological congress is concerned. It is amusing to imagine how flabbergasted those people would be upon confrontation with a truly alien post-biological superintelligence of the kind they imagine they pine for, given the hysteria and revulsion with which they greet intellectual enterprises from quotidian intelligences like my own just because I differ from their own interests and problems and vocabulary the least itty bit.

Honestly, just a little pathetic, really, not that it isn’t perfectly expected. This ain’t my first time at the futurological rodeo, after all.

2 comments:

jimf said...

> I will say that I have enjoyed the robotic predictability with
> which some of you are now expressing hostility for the effete
> elite French philosophy I so dastardly represent. . .

RENATO BALDI: Well, for shitty coffee the worst is what you French make.

JACOB: Well! I've been called nigger and I've been called queer
but I've never been called **French**!

-- _La Cage Aux Folles_

ZARZUELAZEN said...

>It is amusing to imagine how flabbergasted those people would be upon confrontation with a truly alien post-biological superintelligence of the kind they imagine they pine for

Indeed. They wouldn't like that one little bit I would wager, since it would quickly expose their guru (EY) as a total clown and most of his positions laughable, even on the technical issues in his field. (That is, if it even bothered to talk to them at all, rather than just banning them from the Internet for presuming to speak for it).

Basically, the 'Singularitarians' are strong in one narrow aspect of cognition (IQ whatever that means), but no better than average on all other aspects of cognition.

They've taken their own narrow conception of intelligence and mistaken it for the whole basis of cognition.

For a post-human to be any where near as powerful as they hope it would have to be a 'super-cognition', encompassing many more aspects of cognition than they would be willing to admit.

I'd say that many of the people involved in 'Singularitarianism' (and the transhumanist lists more generally) have have some rather serious cognitive deficits. There is no other explanation for them persisting with their delusions, even when they have been clearly pointed out.

The thing is Dale, it's almost impossible to get through to someone about an issue assocaited with a serious cognitive deficit, since they aren't even aware that they have a defict nor that is distorting and biasing all their views.

Your point about the real-world advances taking place is also well taken. None of the 'Singularitarians' or 'transhumanists' contributed in the slightest to any of the real advances happening.

There are exciting advances. I'm thinking in particular here of Stephen Wolfram and the new 'Wolfram Alpha' search engine, which will become more important than Google. Sure, its not a super intelligence, but its real, it's almost here (released in May) and it helps people in some small way, which is more than any of Singularitarians have ever done.