 wildcat says: "Technology is heading here. It will predictably get to the point of making artificial intelligence," Yudkowsky said. "The mere fact that you cannot predict exactly when it will happen down to the day is no excuse for closing your eyes and refusing to think about it." Kurzweil, director of the Singularity Institute, is so confident in his predictions of the singularity that he has even set a date: 2029 (above from article). Um. What about 2012? The word 'logical' is used in the article to argue for this singularity. Gross misunderstanding there of the nature of logic. While I do think the implications of AI are very important, I think we must be careful not to close our eyes also to the fact that human history has not been shaped by intelligence so much as the full spectrum of human behaviour. There is no logical, empirical nor 'intelligent' basis for the belief that the human race is evolving anywhere or will survive past tomorrow. Of course, we hope i... abailart, though you are correct in assuming that there is no evidence that we as a race will survive past tomorrow, and though i agree that it is an over the top fashion to map the 'next step', i will still maintain that disregarding the potential of possible futures to come into fruition is an erroneous understanding of human nature, we thrive by speculating possible (mostly better) futures. granted, we are an infant race, walking blindly into an unknown future, nevertheless, project into the future we must, if only for the immediate purpose of continuous sanity.. and the hope, yes the naive hope for a better future..  t stands to reason that technology can then turn arounddon't know much about singularity but sounds promise that tech enhance intelligence. it may influence the 'me" and "other than me" old fashion conceptions. And it's also time "they" (tech) will pay "us" (humans) back .... wildcat, I agree today. History is an emerging process and our main fleshy part in it is reactive. I have a very heavily qualified fascination with new emergences of cognition that are, now, emerging, and of which AI is the clearest place to get a handle. The AI-psychology-language matrix is particularly impressive, and the implicit return to reliance on metaphor and analogy seriously undermines the lugging hulk of linear rationality (which is one reason i am a bit unhappy about using the latter to frame the former). Also, the word 'ethical' remains one of the most complex and difficult words in the language (along with concepts like consciousness, culture, ideology, existentialist ont... Also, because there is a human (nature) tendency to assume teleologicalare we certain that it is human "nature" that has the tendency to assume teleological 'evolution'? it appears that it is more of a cultural/social/political tendency, pressure, or such. evolution has no inherent direction (am not sure even if the word 'progress' in this respect has any meaning) not even a definite increase in complexity. having said the above, emergent properties have system wide ramification, not least of which may be transforming our very definition of what ethics is/stands for via man machine interface. hence my techno-optimism..  teleological futurism is a manifestation of bioevolutionarily prepared optimism, the adaptive apparatus that gets a human or group through a sticky patch, working out how to turn a stone into a rocket etc. Whatever the surface vehicle, and whatever the culture, this syntactically embedded optimism remains a primitive survival mechanism. which of course does not make it any less viable or constructive.. nevertheless, adaptive? yes, primitive? yes, survival?, no.. emergent, yes.. as to sticky patch.. that would be life? BTW, we are never certain about 'human nature' or any of the big metaconcepts of old (that lumber on yet like grumpy dinosaurs), and though this may appear a postmodernist position it is not: it is a position proseltysed from aristotle onwards, and while some of us are happy to be increasingly certain of our doubt regarding discursive abstraction, we are not thereby excluded from discovering certainty in both other modes of thought (poetic, schizophrenic etc) and more so in extralinguistic experience. Cf. Georges Bataille! |
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