[extropy-chat] Futures Past

[Samantha Atkins]

On Oct 9, 2005, at 9:59 PM, J. Andrew Rogers wrote:

> On 10/9/05 8:25 PM, "Russell Wallace" <russell.wallace at gmail.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> I'll bite: My estimate is that the Singularity will happen by the  
>> end of this
>> century, unless we fall into an existential disaster such as  
>> nanowar or world
>> government instead; so anything you want to do to influence the  
>> outcome, you
>> probably need to get it done by 2100 or not at all.
>>
>
>
> The very notion of the Singularity as most transhumanists conceive  
> it is, as
> best as I can tell, premised on the same poor reasoning that Harvey is
> pointing out.
>
> The Singularity as most people conceive of it essentially requires  
> a hard
> take-off(*) of some type in an environment that is not qualitatively
> different than what we have now in many respects.  It is the old  
> fallacy of
> looking at a technology in isolation and forgetting that every other
> technology in society will co-evolve with it.  At what point does the
> Singularity occur from the perspective of individuals if they are an
> integral part of the system?  In many scenarios it would be as fluid a
> transition as the 20th century was.  Sure, to a 2005 human it would  
> appear
> abrupt, but at any point in the curve you will have something of human
> derivation that has fluidly evolved with the technology and is  
> integrated
> with it.  Hell, many of us probably cannot imagine a world without the
> modern Internet but I would assume that most of us have lived with  
> that
> reality at some point.


Unless we are so integrated with the technology that our brains are  
running a million times faster I fail to see how the advent of  
artificial human level general intelligent but running at computer  
speeds would fail to reach Singularity relative to the humans of the  
time.

If humans are running at such speeds then they are so massively re- 
engineered that they effectively are the AIs.

- samantha