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

ie idiots

simulating human consciousness seems like the kind of thing that would generate a ton of new innovations in a variety of fields, and there are plenty of applications for more advanced AI.

the rapture for nerds thing is a subset of the superAI crowd, but it is a strong one. i mean there's a whole cryo industry developing around the idea that everyone should preserve themselves after their pre-singularity death so that when the technology is there to live together they can be unfrozen and join the infinity crew. and also of course the struggle against death is maybe the most primal thing there is, and now that a lot of people think that doesn't god exist, the struggle against death doesn't just go away. so the fact that there are people hoping for a way to solve death through AI is easy to fun of but it's also very predictable.

but there are plenty of other uses that you can imagine for a superintelligent AI beyond nerd rapture, like mordy says.

there are plenty of applications for more advanced AI.

I agree. We are nowhere near the singularity and therefore the diminishment of returns I spoke of is only at its bare beginning.

I suspect we'll develop AI as an emergent property of some future supercomplex computing system--like the way the net becomes self-aware in Neuromancer--but it won't be like human consciousness, it'll be it's own thing

Trading software? Isn't a lot of shares trading already done by algorithms that people don't really understand / can't really control?

Robert Harris wrote a potboiler-ish but fun novel about trading software turning AI, then making money by betting against insurance markets after putting viruses into airline software to make planes crash, etc

I do think if AI is created it will be like HAL becasue there are so many assheads its going to decide humans are prone to assheadishness and neutralize us al

Vote for Zoltan!!

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

scott alexander reviews robin hanson's new book:
http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/28/book-review-age-of-em/

...for example, he has two pages about what sort of swear words the far future might use. And the book’s style serves to reinforce its weirdness. The whole thing is written in a sort of professorial monotone that changes little from loving descriptions of the optimal arrangement of pipes for cooling future buildings (one of Hanson’s pet topics) to speculation on our descendents’ romantic relationships (key quote: “The per minute subjective value of an equal relation should not fall much below half of the per-minute value of a relation with the best available open source lover”)

what

hanson responds:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2016/05/alexander-on-age-of-em.html

more like dingleberrity

Robin Hanson is the very best of all these weirdos, his strangeness is shot through with and I would even say profoundly informed by something deeply human and serious, even as he adopts positions that are foreign to almost all of us for good reason.

thanks for posting that, mordy - really fascinating read

can't help feeling like catastrophic climate change is going to fuck us up as a species long before we're anywhere close to what hanson proposes tho

i really like Robin Hanson

can't help feeling like catastrophic climate change is going to fuck us up as a species long before we're anywhere close to what hanson proposes tho

Definitely. Maybe a few people living in sheltered settlements with desperate peons to maintain the hardware might be uploading themselves, the rest of us not so much

brains are not computers and other useful observations

https://aeon.co/essays/your-brain-does-not-process-information-and-it-is-not-a-computer

brains are close enough to information processors for crazy stuff like this to be possible
http://news.berkeley.edu/2011/09/22/brain-movies/

sounds thoroughly useless

don't tell david lynch that

http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2015/06/23/19/29E71A7500000578-3136480-image-a-3_1435085917887.jpg

Again, the brain is not a computer article is bald-faced idiocy

http://recursed.blogspot.com/2016/05/yes-your-brain-certainly-is-computer.html

And I hate to see the blame for it being laid at psychologists' feet--no psychologist I know thinks nonsense like the brain does not process information. The guy is way outside any kind of mainstream, except maybe the facebook "i fucking love science" kind

although, okay, i see you may have posted that disparagingly in the first place.

I like my iphone or whatever but in general I fear computers.

as someone who has studied this shit extensively, the "yes your brain is a computer" article is junk that jumps between logic-chopping and ignorance on the bio side. also surprised that a respected computer scientist can cite the church-turing thesis as evidence of anything as its generally considered by those who actually think about these things a metaphysical claim that you can't actually prove, since there's no good way to even state it that doesn't end up tautologous. the first half argues "your brain is a computer" in a sense that is just "there is a physical process of 'your brain' that can be encoded in a computer or anywhere else" at which point we might as well argue that any physical system in the world is a computer, which is interesting if self-serving from a computer-science perspective but useless otherwise.

the second half picks very partial evidence from people that really have looked at biological models and neural networks and is incredibly out of touch with the state-of-the-art (well, circa the last time i checked in which is a while ago) there.

not stanning for the article its responding to, but its pretty clear that its engaging in a massive misreading, likely from some ur-skeptical "if you say the brain isn't a computer you're mystifying consciousness and trying to invent an immortal soul" sort of slippery slope nonsense.

article is junk that jumps between logic-chopping and ignorance on the bio side

I thought you were talking about the "no your brain is not a computer here", which is a wild ride of strawmanning and empty theses dressed up in profound-sounding language.

People always have compared the brain to whatever the current technology is, like clockwork, steam engines, computers, holograms

to catch the ball, the player simply needs to keep moving in a way that keeps the ball in a constant visual relationship with respect to home plate and the surrounding scenery (technically, in a ‘linear optical trajectory’). This might sound complicated, but it is actually incredibly simple, and completely free of computations, representations and algorithms.

I'm not sure this guy understands what 'computation', 'representation' or 'algorithm' mean.

Sterling otm

Fair enough; I just grabbed a link to the first reasonable-sounding article I came across that presented an objection to the first one.

Earlier in the talk Musk made it quite clear that he believes " not all AI futures are benign." He's especially concerned that AI could take "a direction that would be not good for the future."

Musk launched OpenAI to prevent such a future, but it does not appear that he has all that much faith in the plan, since he's already thinking of at least one way that humans can stay ahead of artificial intelligence that he believes will leave us so far behind as to "be like a pet or like the house cat" for the AI.

The way around this, Musk explained, is something called a Neural Lace. It's essentially an artificial intelligence layer for humans.

i know this is an ignorant opinion, but why not just stop creating artificial intelligence? how many years of sci-fi do we have telling us it's a bad idea?

it just seems like there is no payoff to a.i. automating jobs will lead to mass unemployment unless workers succeed in seizing the means of production. virtual reality and things like sex robots will just increase alienation. smartphones are enough. computer technology should just call it a day and stop advancing. devote those resources to building a better alternative energy infrastructure.

the only thing like this i am excited for is self-driving cars.

if a.i. can somehow improve medical care i am all for that too. i just don't go in for this blurring the distinction between human and machine thing. it seems very bad.

hey, a friend of mine recently wrote a book about moore's law/gordon moore if you like computer stuff!

http://www.amazon.com/Moores-Law-Silicon-Valleys-Revolutionary/dp/0465055648/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1464878754&sr=1-1&keywords=moore%27s+law

(this is just a shameless plug for his book. doesn't have anything to do with the singularity. probably.)

i long for the day when 'robots taking the jobs' is met with the same dead-eyed skepticism as 'millenials in the workplace' thinkpieces

terms like 'machine learning' and 'neural networks' are pretty annoying in that the things they refer to are pretty /dumb/ and really just math that's good at finding patterns, really not even in the span of the kinds of qualities that make human intelligence intelligent in the way we think of the term

that's what i always assumed tbh but i am reading more and more stuff that is like, "oh yeah, automation is the new reality." or, in the academia thread, "these object oriented ontologists are just anticipating the day when there isn't a firm distinction between humans and objects, i.e. machines" (paraphrasing)

this is great

http://biorxiv.org/content/biorxiv/early/2016/05/26/055624.full.pdf

if the brain literally was just a computer, we still wouldn't come close to having the tools to understand it

clever

the singularity is here

https://www.cnet.com/news/its-happening-googles-ai-is-building-more-ais/

bring it

Nah. The only 'live' project mentioned in that article was "making Google Search more responsive to users' needs". All the rest was speculation about Some Day It Will Be So.

a search engine that can input its own search queries

"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)
"kill me" About 62,900,000 results (1.17 seconds)

Siri, ask Alexa what the time is...

I hear the software just produced one of these https://i.redd.it/89clk3nfj2yy.gif