From: Giu1i0 Pri5c0 (pgptag@gmail.com)
Date: Sat Dec 03 2005 - 23:28:05 MST
Interesting story on the Singularity. In 2104, an historian explain what
"Singularity" meant and why it did not happen in the previous century. The
main argument is that the complexity of the *interesting* problems to be
solved increase exponentially with the capacity to solve them, thus the rate
of progress stay linear. For example, even with computers with more
processing capacity than the human brain, they don't have yet anything
resembling a human intelligence embodied in a machine. The Searle argument
is quoted.
I am not sure if I buy this argument, but I also suspect that the "gentle
hill of progress" will continue as such, at least from the point of view of
those who are climbing it.
Ambient Irony <http://ai.mu.nu/archives/2104/01/forever_in_a_dr.php>: "And
that's what killed the Spike. The Technological Singularity relied on the
assumption that we would have ever-increasing computational resources to
address the problem of, well, increasing our computational resources, but
that the problems we would have to solve would not increase at the same
rate. When it turned out that the complexity of the problems increased as
fast as - or even faster than - our ability to solve them, the inevitable
Spike turned into the gentle hill of progress. And instead of the transhuman
era, we ended up with a very human era indeed".
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