[ExI] singularity thru simulation of evolution

[Tomasz Rola]

On Sun, 15 Nov 2009, spike wrote:

>  
> > 
> On Sun, Nov 15, 2009 at 6:20 PM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
> 
> >>What I do mean is this: what is your mental picture or roadmap, however
> fuzzy, to the singularity?
> > 
> > If I had to fantasize about it, then I would say some expert 
> > system could
> > - by some unevitable accident - gain enough critical mass to 
> > develop self-awareness... Tomasz Rola
> 
> 
> Every singularity model I have heard reminds me of this:
> 
> http://www.sciencecartoonsplus.com/pages/gallery.php
> 
> {8^]
> 
> spike

Yep, I know this is trivial and has holes. But what else would you expect 
from a stone age relic? I like things to be either trivial so I can easily
catch them or concrete like a... concrete, so they can help me in my 
hunting.

But didn't you write "however fuzzy"? You yourself have asked for it :-).

Anyway, one more try, however trivially it may sound to some wiser minds.

1. Expert systems seem to me, as anything AI-related, to be kind of 
underground. But this is just illusion, since they are going to be behind 
a lot of future technology and life-as-a-whole IMHO. Sometimes they are 
not called by name, but this is just illusion. The name is not sexy to 
common folk, so it is replaced by something else to please the bosses. One 
usual suspect displaying this trend are big corporations, where AFAIK an 
effort is on its way (and for some time already) to "save and reuse 
workers' knowledge" as workers come and go. There are probably some other 
suspects that I am not aware off. So I expect those systems will grow and 
play a big role in the future.

2. And one sunny morning an inevitable accident - ayay, a 
m...m...m...miracle! - will happen. Actually, I think it will be neither 
of them. Just a very simple thing called maintainance. A big and costly 
ex.sys. will have to be maintained in effort to make it more useful. If 
it is really useful and not some money sucker project (highly improbable 
if it survives in a business environment for longer), than it's only 
a matter of time when ex.sys. gains a critical mass of facts and rules. 
Hence I call it inevitable. Just let it stay in the game for long enough 
and it will get complicated enough (don't know if this means years or 
decades).

3. An ex.sys. develops self-awareness, by which I mean it can compute the 
fact of it's own existence from it's database, while the fact itself has 
not been explicitly entered into a db. I.e. the computation is not a 
simple "find a statement" job.

4. What happens next - I think it depends a lot on how much autonomy this 
ex.sys. will be granted by its owners. I doubt they will be able to get an 
idea about what's going on. They should know it too, and would prepare in 
advance for such event. I am far from suggesting they should power off or 
reboot and restore last backup (this would be too much ass covering 
approach for my taste, no new knowledge gained and so on). I am also far 
from suggesting they should watch in ave (this would be too irresponsible 
approach for my taste). Between those two extremes, there is a lot of 
possibilities, some leading to a Singularity, some the other way. So there 
is a lot of probability theory and I cannot say what exactly will happen.

If you are going to show me some funny picture now, I hope it will be a 
different one at least. :-).

Regards,
Tomasz Rola

--
** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
**                                                                 **
** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **