ray kurzweil's 'the singularity is near' & any other technological singularity-related books you might care about

only superficially related to singularity but reading this made me happy this morning:
http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/world_population_may_actually_start_declining_not_exploding.html

do you ever get this feeling that the singularity may actuall be a horrible doomsday scenario like in Disney's The Balck Hole

tbh the first thing i think of when i think of the singularity is Skynet

i was reading this just recently: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility

it a pretty fascinating phenomenon imo. more than the prosaic explanations i wonder about the dynamics of populations or species, the possibility or maybe fantasy that effects like this could be some kind of self-regulation.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ7aDyJPn3c

would there be such things in a post singualirty world?> i think not

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/01/doomsday_clock_from_the_bulletin_of_the_atomic_scientists_for_2013.html

What Mordy seems to be saying is that it's really a race between the arrival of utopia (via the supra-magical powers of the singularity) and the arrival of doomsday (via the agency of various apocalyptic horsemen spawned in the last century).

Advanced physics and applied mathematics! You can't live with them and you can't live without them! /hennyyoungman

rolling utopias and dystopias 2013

is grey goo part of the singularity? people have patiently tried to explain "singularity" to me and it's always like james brown trying to explain "funky" and they end up gesticulating and shouting "get down" "unngh!"

It's like this, you see, the singularity will be like this GIGANTIC amoeba that surrounds and engulfs all the nuclear bombs and greenhouse gases and digests them and transforms them into PARADISE! And we don't even have to know how this will happen, because if we keep on doing what we're doing now, it will just HAPPEN! How cool is that?

we should worship this amoeba and demand that everyone else does as well

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2013/mar/21/homunculism

Read the other day that Kurzweil is moving to Google - a sign of end-times convergence?

ht forks

http://www.kurzweilai.net/what-our-civilization-needs-is-a-billion-year-plan

287,000,000 years from now:

"I'm very sorry sir, but you can't do that. It isn't mentioned in the plan our ancestors wrote 287,000,000 years ago."

i like the images in that article. didn't read the words.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/images/TemperatureOfSun.png

!!

body temperature will apparently be about 60 Celsius in 360 years' time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Comparison_of_the_sequence_1_to_10_and_their_logs_to_the_base_10.png

:/ well, imagine that image is showing how log scales work

He may as well have suggested that we put a penny into a savings account today at 3% interest so we'd have a gazillion dollars to spend in a couple thousand years, thereby solving everythng.

1.03 ^ 2000

4.7E+25. wow, i think you're onto something there...

oh, wait, minus 20% tax.

money, what could possibly go wrong?

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2013/10/futurist_magazine_s_predictions_on_quantum_computing_big_data_and_more.html

heh, still reading through this but:

The question that seems never to come up when discussing population forecasts is: Why does population grow in some places and decline in others?

that's...actually probably the most common question that always comes up when discussing popular forecasts

http://www.overcomingbias.com/2013/12/comics-vs-cases.html

http://io9.com/what-will-life-be-like-when-digital-brains-outnumber-hu-1529764158

hanson strikes me as a really dumb smart person

he of the crystalline logic of "all claims of inequality are expressions of envy" and "all rules against sexual harassment are a status game of imposing class standards on the poor"

he's clearly a very brilliant + creative thinker who is wrong about everything he thinks - but i'd much prefer that to some dumb slob who is dogmatically "otm" about everything

i prefer dumb slobs who are somehow otm

otm is just CW for a niche audience

I hate these people. surrounded by them in the tech industry hub that I live in but ugh

what's cw when it's at home?

cw is aka conventional wisdom to its homies

ta, I might have higher standards of otm than mordy

i'm a descriptivist

http://riseofthecommonwoodpile.tumblr.com/post/77928533367/the-idea-of-the-technological-singularity-is-late

the idea of the technological singularity is late capitalism’s most brilliant move because it plays off any criticism of capitalism’s use of technology to disenfranchise and oppress by basically saying that technology under late capitalism just hasn’t progressed enough so we need to double down on it to save ourselves

it’s like if someone was stabbing you and you said “stop stabbing me” so they came up with this bullshit idea that said if you just get stabbed enough, all your stab wounds will be miraculously healed so the solution is actually to increase the size of the knife and the rate of stabbing

it’s a thing of beauty really

tbf that's the argument of marxism too - that technology under late capitalism hasn't progressed enough

http://moronlab.blogspot.com/2010/01/urbit-functional-programming-from.html

u know that dude is king of the "neoreactionaries," right?

i'm not really familiar w/ "neoreactionaries" but i think the urbit stuff is very clear. not sure if it's explicitly ideologically complicit, but it surely doesn't need to be exclusively so?

very cool, not clear*

the urbit stuff is nonsense. this is a professional expert opinion.

it is carefully constructed, internally consistent, nonsense.

a physicist receives pages of scrawled calculations from a kook. they're on vacation and read the pages, for kicks. the pages contain formulae which make sense. but the formulae don't describe anything, they just aren't mathematically false. tile patterns in ancient mosques are mentioned, and formulae given for them. these are valid formulae, and pretty drawings of tiles. chaos is mentioned, and the mandelbrot formula is also given correctly, two ways. but the whole is less than the sum of its parts. the physicist shakes his head and thinks "this kook, under other circumstances, could maybe have been an engineer, or even a physicist. they can see elements of beauty, and they can perform some of the procedures that physicists perform correctly. but they cannot understand the purpose in what we do."

that is urbit.

feel like that could apply to chunks of his mencius moldbug stuff as well.

lol sterl

'Haskell fans' <--- battle of the interested parties!!

obviously we need to encourage impartial grant funding and science journalism about this disagreement so that unfettered exploration can lead to the truth

oh, wow

http://techcrunch.com/2013/11/22/geeks-for-monarchy/