[ExI] 23andSingularity

[Adrian Tymes]

How's it going to handle the many people - probably the
majority, still, of humans on Earth - for whom there is no
publicly accessible online information?

(FaceBook claims to have billions of users.  At least
some of them provably do not map to any actual human
being, even if that is in violation of FB's terms of service.
One wonders if perhaps the majority of its claim is such
cases.)


On Sat, Jul 6, 2013 at 9:54 PM, spike <spike at rainier66.com> wrote:

>
>
> OK, I admit to obsessing over this whole 23 business.  So sue me.
>
> If we give a computer a clear and narrowly defined goal, software can mimic
> human intelligence, in that one narrow area.  The classic example is chess.
>
> It occurred to me that we could program something like a will to figure out
> an enormous but very specific question: how are all the carbon units on
> 23andMe related?
>
> We have a number of techniques we can use, similar to the ones I had: a
> young lady contacted me with only her name and her father's name.  From
> that
> I was able to go to her facebook page, verify that her photo there matched
> the photo on her 23andMe page, so I know I had the right person, from that
> get her birth date and place, compare my ancestry to hers to get the
> intersection, go into my relatives looking for existing family trees in
> soft
> copy on Ancestry dot com, trace branched downward until I found a name that
> matches the one she supplied for her father, go to Spokeo and see that one
> of his past addresses is a small town where she was born.
>
> There is not one step anywhere above that couldn't be done with computer
> code.  If we set scripts to run tirelessly searching using these various
> techniques, I have no doubt we could accumulate enormous databases in such
> a
> way that the computer code just keeps getting smarter and smarter, until it
> is way better than human counterparts, just as computers can play better
> chess than any human now.  It would represent a kind of nano-singularity, a
> tiny slice of human existence in which code came along and was taught our
> ways of finding these sorts of things, then it just started doing it and
> accumulating more and more data, with error checking and verification, and
> with each verified link, the system became stronger, since it can now use
> those links to find others, until one day it surpasses every human.  Then
> in
> that one tiny nano-slice of life, we could claim that a singularity of
> sorts
> has occurred.
>
> We might not even be able to figure out how the code discovered the genetic
> links: it was given a goal to find them, along with a bucket of techniques
> like what I did in the fourth paragraph, and off it went.  Then most people
> on the planet, or rather most westerners, could just give it a DNA sample
> and it could hand you back your entire genome history map, including all
> anomalies, within minutes.
>
> Oooh my, is this cool, or what?
>
> spike
>
>
>
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