[extropy-chat] Sterling, Wired, and the Singularity

[Emlyn]

On Fri, 03 Sep 2004 15:51:25 -0500, Damien Broderick
<thespike at satx.rr.com> wrote:
> At 04:27 PM 9/3/2004 -0400, Bret wrote:
> 
> >Interview in Wired with Craig Newmark, of Craigslist.
> >http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/craigslist.html?tw=wn_tophead_7
> 
> See Bruce Sterling being curmudgeonly on singularity (again) at
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/view.html?pg=4
> 
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"Sure, computers might someday awaken into something resembling human
consciousness, but we have no metrics to describe that awakening and
thus no objective way to recognize it if it happens. How would you
test a claim like that?"

uh, when your PC evolves into pure energy and eats your grandma, maybe
something is up...

"Vinge put it this way: "For me, the superhumanity is the essence of
the Singularity. Without that, we would get a glut of tech-nical
riches, never properly absorbed." Remove the magic threat of
artificial intelligence from Vinge's prognostication, and you get a
brilliant description of the present day: a glut of technical riches,
never properly absorbed. Instead of spiritual supercomputers for
brains, we've got a spam-choked Internet."

yes, the internet is sooooo 1999. Hardly.

"The singularity's biggest flaw isn't that it's hard to imagine, but
that it flatters its human inventors. We may be on the verge of an
astounding breakthrough! Or, with equal likelihood, we may be at the
edge of a new dark age of plagues, mass hunger, and climate
destabilization. More likely yet, we live in a dull, self-satisfied,
squalid eddy in history, blundering around with no concept of progress
and no sense of direction. "

Where is this guy living, camp xray?

-- 
Emlyn

http://emlynoregan.com   * blogs * music * software *