[extropy-chat] Collective Singularities (Was: Desirability of Singularity)

[Damien Sullivan]

On Mon, Jun 05, 2006 at 03:22:39AM +0200, Anders Sandberg wrote:
> Damien Sullivan wrote:

> > The Singularity of the evolution of Homo sapiens probably had more to do
> > with structural changes and developing language than with simply using
> > more energy.  Then again, I'm skeptical that any phase changes like that
> > exist in the future.  OTOH, digital intelligence, with benefits of long

> The "language singularity" was really about rapid spread of information
> and cumulative storage of it within human groups. Possibly we could speak

For practical purposes, yeah.  I was thinking of the jump to being
approximately Turing-complete, though, being able to be arbitrarily
precise and complex in our reference to the world, including references
to past and future and things not present, and ability to trade complex
instructions.  Biologists like to talk about gradualism, but computer
science actually gives us some hard jumps, and reasons for humans and
dogs to not be on the same plane.  It doesn't encourage belief in a
plane above ours, though.

As for energy efficiency of the brain, I don't know.  Even my numbers
gave three orders of magnitude, yeah.  An evolutionist might suspect
we're missing something: is anything else in biology that
thermodynamically crappy?  Metabolism compares well to our heat engines,
AFAIK.  Plants turn about 1% of sunlight into sugars but I suspect
they're limited by the difficulty of extracting CO2 from 1/10,000
concentrations -- CO2 as the rate limiter, not energy, though one could
wonder why nitrogen wasn't sucked out and used as a storage mechanism.
But computation is a millionth of potential limits?

-xx- Damien X-)