4nomore.net » singularity

Charles Platt: The Silicon Man

admin — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 20:52:00 +0000

Great book – I liked this very much! Without giving too much away, it is about the possibility of uploading people into complex computers. The first part is mainly a detective story which I did not find too impressive, but then as soon as the main topic comes into play, it is quite fascinating as it explores the implications, how one might feel etc from the perspective of the main character after uploading in a purely virtual world. And, it shows a nice bright future for geeks …

AI Engineering To Singularity

admin — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 19:41:00 +0000

Fascinating article by Ben Goertzel about Is AI Engineering the Shortest Path to a Positive Singularity?: he says that with a ‘AI Manhattan Project’ an artificial general intelligence could be built within about 10 years. And this AGI would be the most important building block and accelerator to a singularity, which then could be few years later already …

There are also a few remarks about free will which I find interesting:

The mother of all patterns in an intelligent system is the self. If a system can recognize the coherent, holistic pattern of its own self, by observing its actions in the world and the world’s responses to it—then the system can build a self, or what psychologists call a self-model. And a reasonably accurate, dynamically updated self-model is the key to adaptiveness, to the ability to confront new problems as they arise in the course of interacting with the world and with other minds.

And if a system can recognize itself, it can recognize probabilistic relationships between itself and various effects in the world. It can recognize patterns of the form “If I do X, then Y is likely to occur.” This leads to the pattern known as will. There are important senses in which the conventional human concept of ‘free will’ is an illusion—but it’s an important illusion, critical for guiding the actions of an intelligent agent as it navigates its environments. In order to achieve human-level general intelligence, a pattern-recognizing system must be able to model itself and then model the effects of various states its self may take—and this amounts to modeling personal will and causation.

The trick of digital mind design, then, is not any particular way of representing, recognizing or enacting patterns: it’s creating a pattern-recognition system, by hook or by crook, that can recognize some critical key patterns: self, will, reflective awareness. Once these patterns are recognized, then some critical recursions kick in and a mind can monitor itself, shape itself, improve itself. The question is how do we get a pattern-recognition system to that point, given the available computational resources? This is the question to which my Novamente AI design is intended to give one possible answer.

Singularity And Religion

admin — Wed, 05 Apr 2006 15:43:00 +0000

From “A Rapture for the Rest of Us” by Glenn Harlan Reynolds:

Jihadists are strapping on suicide bombs today, in the hope of attaining the kind of environment that virtual reality will deliver in 20 years.

The promises of religion, of paradise etc could become real through sweeping technological changes of our world (aka Singularity). As the people obviously are looking to these promises (proven by the followers of the religions), they will strive for that goal in reality if at all possible!

Charles Stross: Accelerando

admin — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:51:00 +0000

A science fiction book for Slashdot geeks … I would guess it is quite hard to understand, if one is not a bit dedicated to this world and has not heard of these terms (Matrioshka brain etc) before and does not know the background related to (like the Free Hardware Foundation [But actually, there is a Accelrando Technical Companion available!]. It is a nice read, but on the weird side – at least for me. It recounts the history of a family – kind of four generations, but stretched – due to the various new possibilities of up- and downloading from meatspace to brainspace and back, the duplication, freezing etc – over a much longer time.
It nicely plays in the beginning with the description of the increasing augmentation of a normal human by adding external (and later internal) extensions – until the main character, when robbed of his extensions at one point, feels completely disoriented and helpless (nicely described here!).
As the title tells, it also describes the ever accelerating development of new technologies, up to the Singularity – and beyond. I am impressed by many of Stross’ ideas, for example when he is following the idea that an advanced intelligence will try to convert all dumb matter in a solar system into computronium – but after that, will find it hard to spread any further because of the bandwidth limitations and latency when trying to expand further out.
And another one: that the enormously growing complexity might not lead to ultimately powerful beings, but maybe to the descendants of companies and law structures, which evolve and evolve – but not in the sense I would have hoped for, ultimately becoming stupid or rather senseless (to my limited human feeling) again.
Stross continues the story by following the characters who chose to keep in some sense human and a human individuality. I am not convinced by this picture of the very far future, where the beings stay in or get back to a human form, producing children and everything, although unbelievable powerful – having habitats spread (through wormholes) across light years.
Inbetween are a lot of interesting twists of splitted persons meeting their counterparts, or having to face the actions of the counterparts and many other funny things and surprising turns.
Very enjoyable read all in all!

The complete book is freely available at www.accelerando.org.

Singularity

admin — Sun, 31 Jul 2005 21:49:00 +0000

Best see the Wikipedia page.