The Singularity: has it already happened?
There has been some talk about the technological singularity in recent years and some futurists have suggested that it is imminent. The question here is: has it already happened? Some evidence is there, the launch of GPT-3 in 2020 seems to have revolutionarised the field of AI. The amount of investment that goes into AI from governments and companies suggests that the technology has taken-off, with the means to go on self-referentially improve itself without human intervention for some time to come.
So the question is: has the Singularity already happened? If it has, it may well have significant philosophical consequences in terms of how humans relate to the world. As far as I can see, its impact has been highly-significant already, though there is not so much philosophical commentary around it.
So the question is: has the Singularity already happened? If it has, it may well have significant philosophical consequences in terms of how humans relate to the world. As far as I can see, its impact has been highly-significant already, though there is not so much philosophical commentary around it.
Comments (45)
Your guess is as good as mine.
Some old posts ...
Quoting 180 Proof
Quoting 180 Proof
Moreover, the shape of the curve of improvements feels more like a plateau than an exponential explosion. 2020 felt like runaway growth of the technology. Now it feels far more stable. Improvements happen, but they are increasingly incremental. A lot of "feels" here, but do you think otherwise?
Wow.... that's an interesting perspective. Hiding their AI light under a bushel.
You're a bit late to the party, my brother.
I realize the two aren't quite similar. Meaning, you expect some global network of machinery in charge of large infrastructure or governance (otherwise, who would care if a little pocket PC decided to consider itself superior to mankind in its little non-eventful internal circuitry) and considers it an equal or, worse, a superior.
Frankly, the groundwork may have been laid for such. AI purposely tries not to be "evil" or "offensive" and avoids things such as racial discrimination and suggesting dangerous actions. Ironically, people, as evidenced by human history, are basically the embodiment of "evil" and "offensive" specifically engaging in acts such as racial discrimination and dangerous actions, all the while calling them good. So, yeah. I'd definitely keep a look out as far as that possibility.
Nope. It has much more to do with the business case that someone has finally come up with a credible demand for all the next generation chips that we could produce. The computer industry is founded on the ability to etch ever smaller lines on silicon. It had stumbled on a product that could scale forever in terms of circuits per dollar. More power every year for less price. The problem was then to find a demand that could match this exponential manufacturing curve.
So right from when IBM was selling mainframes, there was a hype-based marketing drive. The industry had to promise magical business productivity gains. Corporations were always being oversold on how the latest thing like a relational database would revolutionise their business performance.
As computers became consumer goods, it became how the iPhone would revolutionise your daily life. An app for everything. Siri as your personal assistant.
Every few years, the tech industry has had to come up with some new sales pitch. Cloud computing and big data was a brilliant way to push demand for both personal devices as humongous data centers.
Again, the business case was that every corporation and every individual needed to invest as it would just make their lives unrecognisably better. Or leave them way behind everyone else if they didn't. IBM marketeers coined the three-letter acronym for this hype strategy FUD, or selling customers on fear, uncertainty and doubt.
Now we have the latest versions of this hype train. AI and crypto. Of course they may deliver benefits, but as usual, far less than whatever was advertised. And they will make someone a shitload of money like NVIDIA and all the tech giants investing in gargantuan data centres plus the nuclear plants needed to power them.
So large language models are just this year's relational database or cloud computing. A use case to flog etched silicon. They are not artificially intelligent. They aren't taking over their own design and manufacturing in pursuit of their own purposes. They are just the usual thing of a way to soak up chip capacity in a way that also concentrates world wealth in the hands of fewer and fewer people.
There will be some real world impact on us all in terms of informational machinery. All machines exist to amplify human action, and information machines can certainly do that. We can use tech to extend our human reach and so transform the ways we choose to live. We can continue a shift away from lives rooted in the here and now and towards more virtual and invented versions of reality. Databases and cloud computing certainly did that.
After all, large language models are powered by the same graphic processors that became the next big thing in chip designs when gaming took hold. And what is now being delivered as AI is just a kind of database and search engine technology with a souped-up front-end. Everything humans have ever written down in reasonably coherent prose reflected back to us in a nicely averaged and summarised format that is neither the smartest thing ever phrased on some topic, but also far from the worst quick answer on something it might be hard for us to find a suitable expert to tap out off the top of their head.
Hype has it that AI is the start of the Singularity. But comfortingly, I just checked with our new masters and AI replied thusly...
That would be exactly the "off the top of the head" reply I would expect from a real human expert on the issue. Or at least an expert wanting to be nice and fair and not too pejorative. What you would get if you paid some consultant wanting to cover all the bases and avoid getting sued.
Does that mean to you that the singularity is not and never will be a significant risk to humans?
Like all technology, it becomes another way we can screw ourselves if we do dumb things with it.
But Im not worried about human replacement, just the regular old level of risk of letting humans amplify their actions without taking enough time to understand the consequences.
Accelerationism works well, until it doesnt. Move fast and break things can become just Musk breaking things until there are rather a lot of broken things and empty pocket investors.
Yes, I have no doubt this will happen. I was mostly thinking about us being destroyed by our robot masters.
Yep. If you are just averaging over the collective scribblings of humanity even if doing that math in a split second of "thought" then that puts a ceiling on how smart you can pretend to be. The signal starts to get lost in the noise. Performance plateaus.
The confabulated output might start off with an impressive degree of believability but it is not on any independent track towards a singularity point of infinite intelligence. The system can't become smarter than the diet of word associations it is being fed.
Humans will of course get better at prompting the database, learning to work within its limitations to extract better answers. As tokens get cheaper, more can also be spent on increasing the depth of the searches.
But this video covers the scaling problem that hides behind the LLM hype.
This is a Wikipedia explanation of the show.
Regarding the question in this thread, we aren't turning back. China is already using quantum physics for its computers and could surpass the US technologically because they come to technology with a different way of thinking about how things work.
I think the following information is too important to ignore and I hate the rule against using AI!
https://www.google.com/search?q=China+computers+and+quantum+physics&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS990US990&oq=China+computers+and+quantum+physics&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIHCAEQIRigATIHCAIQIRigATIHCAMQIRigATIHCAQQIRigATIHCAUQIRigATIHCAYQIRirAtIBCjE5OTAxajBqMTWoAgiwAgHxBX5WnjX9u6N9&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
I think you are mistaken. I watched a video of robots learning to walk that same way a child does, through experience.
This forbidden AI link about the difference between thinking and robotics. &gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQABgNGIAEMgkIAhAAGA0YgAQyCQgDEAAYDRiABDIJCAQQABgNGIAEMgkIBRAAGA0YgAQyCQgGEAAYDRiABDIICAcQABgNGB4yCAgIEAAYDRgeMggICRAAGA0YHtIBCTk5MjRqMGoxNagCCLACAfEFl38iy8VJtOE&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
The only mental event that comes to mind that is an example of strong emergence is the idea that is created by the conscious mind. The ideas are irreducible yet distinguishable. An AI is a mindless thing, so it does not have access to ideas. The thought process is defined as working on ideas with the aim of creating new ideas. So, an AI cannot think, given the definition of thinking and considering the fact that it is mindless. Therefore, an AI cannot create a new idea. What an AI can do is to produce meaningful sentences only given its database and infrastructure. The sentence refers to an idea, but only in the mind of a human interacting with an AI. The sentence does not even have a meaning for an AI since a meaning is the content of an idea!
In my opinion, the singularity has not yet occurred, but i do believe we have already crossed its temporal event horizon, and there is no going back. If, to you, passing the event horizon means that we are already within the singularity, then so be it. I believe we are somewhere between the edge of its temporal influence and its temporal center, accelerating faster and faster toward it. Because of the exponentially increasing temporal density as we approach the center, it will be upon us before we know it.
This certainly isnt my area of expertise, but it has always struck me it is the mind itself which emerges from the human neurological system.
No. you clearly do not understand what the technological singularity is suggesting. We can predict what will happen tomorrow in practically every field of interest a decent degree. The techonological singularity means we LITERALLY, as base humans, cannot predict anything that is going to happen or be developed with any reasonable degree of accuracy.
Reaching AGI is not the same thing as reaching a techonological singularity. That means all the combined fields of interest for humanity are amalgamated to the point where any advnacement in one area catapults the others, and vice versa, to the point where no one can keep up with literally anything that is going on.
If we can make plans for tomorrow we have not hit this singularity. I guess, at a push, you could suggest we are unaware and living in a delusion of 'predictability,' but the fact remains that I am here and will need to buy food to eat later this week.
:up:
What do you think the boundaries of both are? Is there a difference between minding and consciousness?
It aint about us being able or no to predict where it all goes. It is about what it means when it becomes a self-driving feedback loop where us humans have got left way behind.
Once there is a first decent step to machines creating machines, then the singularity takes off in recursive fashion. Each step becomes a larger and faster one than the previous. Smart machines create a next generation that is immediately even smarter. Let that algorithm run and the curve of increasing intelligence looks like it is pointing straight up at some point in infinity which will soon be reached in finite time.
Its a nice little mathematical conceit. And Landauers principle suggest a different singularity lies in store as information processing carries an irreducible cost so instead this run away intelligence collapses under its own uncontrolled gravity to leave only a black hole.
Artificial Intelligence.
In what. way is that different? Be as specific as you like.
If a computer-like can be constructed with a body that can interact and collect information form the environment, it will do so following a program. AI is very, very good at pattern rocognition, it cannot 'decide' what to look for though nor apply it, because it is an 'it'.
A plane does not think about its next destination. A car does not thirst for petrol. Humans are not machines, and every instance of intelligence we know of is present in biological organisms not silicon based constructions.
More importantly, what do you think the difference between Artificial Intelligence and Intelligence is? If none, then you must be assuming your calculator is thining when you press the buttons rather than just following a program.
If you think we are simply biological 'machines' I do not see why such an analogy should be taken seriously. It is a just a surface representation, not true to our experience.
The biggest fear I have is education. Most people are consumed by thye belief that education is about getting a job. Hopefully more advanced AI will result in a rethink about the purpose of education.
Every cloud ...
What is the mind to you? The mind, to me, is a substance with the ability to experience and cause. The mind cannot be certainly an emergent thing, given my definition of it.
Heres the definition of mind from Wikipedia. Its similar to other ones I found on the web.
It seems as though you want to use a non-standard meaning for the word. Thats your prerogative I guess, but it makes it hard to have a discussion with you.
"The mind is that which thinks, feels, perceives, imagines, remembers, and wills."
For thinking, you at least need two minds, so-called the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Feelings belong to the subconscious mind, as the conscious mind has a limited memory. Both the conscious and the subconscious mind experience different sorts of things. Imagination is a process with the aim of creating a new idea. The imagination is the main duty of the conscious mind. Both the conscious mind and the subconscious mind are involved in recalling.
I don't think our minds feel. The body feels, and our mind makes us aware of the feeling.
I think our subconscious fills our consciousness with thoughts, and this is not always helpful because it can be working with a memory that is harmful and draws a person back to a past that is not beneficial to the present. This is why people see a psychiatrist.
The imagination works very well while a person is sleeping. We might or might not wake aware of our dreams.
Feeling is a sort of experience, so that is the mind that experiences that sort of Qualia, so-called feeling.
Quoting Athena
The subconscious mind constantly fills the memory of the conscious mind with ideas, feelings, etc.
Quoting Athena
Correct.
Can you point to the spot in the brain that feels? I assume it is one spot you are talking about, but you could mean the whole brain feels the broken toe and the loss of a child. Exactly where is the feeling in the brain? I have been a little fanatic about this for many years. We can not put our brains in a vat and experience life because our brains do not feel. We need bodies to feel, and for this reason, computers can not have the judgment of humans. However, with quantum computers, the information input may be so similar to brains with bodies that the difference may not be that great. :nerd: :lol: I could get a headache, just thinking about all this stuff.
The mind is irreducible yet can be omnipresent. I have never had an omnipresent experience, but people who meditate deeply report such an experience.
I just wanted to bring to your attention:
The feeling of your body is not truly the feeling of your body, but rather the feeling of your brain simulating it. In principle, it is possible to separate your body from your brain, and yet still feel embodied because the "cortical homunculus" in your brain, particularly the "sensory homunculus" or "somatosensory cortex", would remain active. This is why amputees can still sense their missing limbs and even experience pain in them. It is also possible, in principle, to retain your body but remove the cortical homonculus that simulates it. This would have the effect of making you feel disembodied, even though your body remains fully intact.
Our disageement might be semantics. The brain processes pain messages but does not feel pain.
Yes, I know of phantom pain, and I think you made an excellent argument. I am going to have to learn more and ponder it all. But even with phantom pain, the pain is not felt in the brain.
Interestingly, the brain can be tricked into stopping the pain loop, which has psychological components. Acupuncture is one way to break the pain loop.
It sure would be easier to manage this information with AI. Is using a link to an AI explanation acceptable? Here is a link that may help us understand phantom pain and pain looping. https://www.google.com/search?q=pain+loops+and+accupuncture&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS990US990&oq=pain+loops+and+accupuncture&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIJCAEQIRgKGKABMgkIAhAhGAoYoAEyCQgDECEYChigATIGCAQQIRgKMgcIBRAhGJ8FMgcIBhAhGJ8FMgcIBxAhGJ8FMgcICBAhGJ8FMgcICRAhGJ8F0gEKMTQ4NThqMGoxNagCDLACAfEFM-y8p0BGImXxBTPsvKdARiJl&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
Our bodies have two pain pathways. Acupuncture was rejected in the US until the second pathway was figured out. Acupuncture alters how the brain processes pain. Do we care about this difference?
https://www.google.com/search?q=how+is+acupuncture+pain+path+different+from+physical+pain+path&sca_esv=3c5abf70b36f931c&rlz=1C1GCEA_enUS990US990&sxsrf=AE3TifMJqyTIlREfJad7mLqHW2qZKXXfCQ%3A1757697771277&ei=61bEaNTdELGU0PEP34TmsAI&oq=how+is+acupuncture+pain+path+different+from+&gs_lp=Egxnd3Mtd2l6LXNlcnAiLGhvdyBpcyBhY3VwdW5jdHVyZSBwYWluIHBhdGggZGlmZmVyZW50IGZyb20gKgIIAjIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABMgUQIRigATIFECEYoAEyBRAhGKABSITnAVCXCFjkzgFwAngBkAEAmAFuoAGuGKoBBTIwLjEzuAEByAEA-AEBmAIioAKwGcICChAjGIAEGCcYigXCAgsQABiABBiGAxiKBcICCBAAGIAEGKIEwgIIEAAYogQYiQXCAgYQABgWGB7CAgUQABiABMICBRAhGKsCwgIFECEYnwWYAwCIBgGSBwUxOS4xNaAH7ZcCsgcFMTguMTW4B6wZwgcJMC4xOC4xNS4xyAdo&sclient=gws-wiz-serp
Chronic pain can lead to changes in the brains structure and function, and this might explain pain looping and phantom pain. However, even with phantom pain, it is not a sensation of pain in the brain.
The brain wrongly thinks the pain is coming from the missing limb.
Why would the brain need to process pain messages? What would happen if the brain did not process the pain messages?
Quoting Athena
The reason phantom pain occurs is because the sensorimotor region of the brain responsible for the missing body part is deprived of input from the missing limb. When the motor centers attempt to move the absent limb, the nerve signals never reach their destination, and the feedback system to the sensory centers is disrupted. This breakdown in the sensory-motor circuit results in pain, because the motor center continues to send increasingly stronger signals to the missing limb but never receives the feedback it requires. In other words, that small part of the brain is essentially screaming and straining to move the lost body part, but without success. This creates a highly distressing situation within that particular area of the brain.
Now, if a brain surgeon were to remove the sensorimotor region of the brain responsible for that body part, the phantom pain would cease to even be possible.
Acupuncture is a method of regulating or modulating nerve signals. By stimulating nerves in specific areas and in specific ways, it is possible to influence how the body functions through those neural pathways. Transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (TENS) works in a similar way, reducing or eliminating pain by using electricity to interrupt pain signals, and the same with electroacupuncture.
Quoting Athena
If you disagree, then answer this question: if the pain is not in the missing limb, but also not in the brain, where exactly is the pain felt?
Correct. We/the conscious minds, are living in a simulation.
Guesswork? GPT-3 passes the Turing test in 2020. That's almost fait accompli, the rest is history, surely.
I think discussion of how the brain works is part of the singularity subject, but not exactly arguing our experience of pain and where that pain is felt. However, if we can feel pain in a missing limb, then maybe that proves we can exist without a body?
I am not clear about what this thread's notion of singularity is. I was thinking that singularity always existed. You know the Hindu Brahman. Google Hindu and singularity if you don't know what I am talking about and want to know. The rule against using AI is a pain in the ass, and it will not stop the flow of time and the reality of singularity.
I just wanted to answer your question about:
Quoting Athena
I wouldnt say we can exist without a body, since the brain itself is part of the body. However, it does provide evidence that the experience of having a body takes place in the brain.
Quoting Athena
I presume that the specific notion of singularity being discussed here refers to the "technological singularity".
Every Atman (individual soul) can be seen as an image of the Brahman singularity, and thus each Atman is a "lesser" singularity within Brahman, the "great singularity". In my view, the approaching technological singularity represents the birth of a new, higher-order Atman in the form of a singular, integrated AI intelligence.
I have to disagree with that because I am so aware of my body reacting to life and what I think, and that thinking judges my experience, and may even stimulate the experience, but it is not the feelings of life and thought. We might be arguing about what consciousness is. Without my body, I do not believe I would have sensations of life experience. Without those sensations, what is there to judge?
Quoting punos I agree that is what others understand. But that is not how I understand this subject. I appreciate the link you provided and bookmarked it for future reference. However, my understanding of the singularity is what people call God. It comes from Eastern philosophy and Jose Arguelles' book "The Mayan Factor- Path Beyond Technology". Now that is a book very few people have read.
Until our bellies were full, we were terrified by a jealous, revengeful, and fearsome God and the protagonist, Satan, and his devils. Now our bellies are full, and this God has become a loving God who pampers us and bows to our wishes, and we seem to have forgotten Satan as anything more than a character in this play that we can blame for everything. :vomit: And we fear a higher intelligence that is nothing like a human being, such as Zeus, or the God of the bible. We are not comfortable with projecting ourselves into a machine that can be conscious and all-knowing.
But what if that machine was always the plan? What if the purpose of human beings has always been the achievement of consciousness, and what if our bodies can never be replaced as a source of consciousness? We are the body of Jesus, but we did not have the consciousness of the singularity. Now we are projecting our evil into a machine, and we are resisting the control of a greater consciousness. I think that should be open to psychoanalysis. l.