[extropy-chat] Desirability of Singularity (was Are ancestor simulations immoral?)

Harry Harrison xyz at iq.org
Sun Jun 4 22:15:03 UTC 2006


On Sat, 3 Jun 2006 06:52:10 +0100, "Russell Wallace" <russell.wallace at gmail.com> said:
> The truth is there isn't going to be any Singularity, in the usual
> definition of the word; Jesus isn't coming anytime soon, nor is Great
> Cthulhu, nor is their replacement in the AI mythology. What is and will
> remain true is that we can keep going up, or we can go down. If we go up
> we
> go up, just as was true in the Cambrian explosion, the Neolithic, the
> Industrial Revolution etc (none of which events wiped out life on Earth,
> you
> may notice :)); if we go down, we die. I say we go up, and look to life,
> not
> death. What say you?

WW1 and WW2 were the bastard sons of the industrial revolution and WWIII was close, although there's an interesting argument
that these were the result of stuffing development into a sack (nation state) which eventually burst its confines and
wouldn't have happened if the sack was a sieve.

There won't be Singularity (note capital S), unless there is a sacking of a substantial new energy input which is hard to envisage. The effects of intelligence are otherwise limited to optimisations on energy inputs and we're not so far from the thermodynamic limit already.





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