Said Ethan Zuckerman, an associate professor of public policy, quoted in "Is Meta’s Facial Recognition Retreat Another Head Fake?" (NYT).
Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate. Why had he been in such a hurry to grow up? It was as if he’d never experienced the grace of childhood. As he watched his little brother frolic, he felt another downward tug in his mood, stronger than the tug he’d felt while shopping but also less painful, because it was occasioned by a feeling of metempsychosis.
This word means the transmigration of the soul, and it comes up from time to time in philosophy, religion, and literature. See a list of the literary works at the Wikipedia page for the word. It's such a classy list! I remembered it from Joyce's "Ulysses." And then there's "Moby Dick":
For hardly have we mortals by long toilings extracted from this world's vast bulk its small but valuable sperm; and then, with weary patience, cleansed ourselves from its defilements, and learned to live here in clean tabernacles of the soul; hardly is this done, when—There she blows!—the ghost is spouted up, and away we sail to fight some other world, and go through young life's old routine again. Oh! the metempsychosis! Oh! Pythagoras, that in bright Greece, two thousand years ago, did die, so good, so wise, so mild; I sailed with thee along the Peruvian coast last voyage—and, foolish as I am, taught thee, a green simple boy, how to splice a rope.
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The Singularity has been called, accurately, The Rapture for nerds.
""The singularity imagines a world in which our consciousness can transcend our bodies...""
That isn't the singularity.
The Singularity refers to the point in time where un-augmented human intelligence will not be able to keep up with the rate of technological change driven by electronic intelligence.
Far less than 1% of the population can describe basic functions of computers like virtual memory, or chip architecture, or compiling. I doubt more than 10% of the population could convert 8 to binary. It would be hilarious watching them try to convert it to Hex just because the answer is so silly. It is a little less silly converting 256 to Hex though.
We are in a time when things appear magical to the average person.
Yet this is not scary because it is still a class of human wizards and witches and warlocks at the helm.
I spend a huge amount of my time learning new languages, structures, techniques, libraries etc.
At some point people like me will not be able to learn this shit fast enough to keep up unless we start implementing electronic augmentations to our biological faculties.
That is the singularity. Nobody has any idea what will happen when the rate of technological change exceeds the ability of biological intelligence to cope with that change. The reason it is called the singularity is because nobody can see past a singularity.
Zuckerman is exactly right about how hard biological systems are to fix when they are not working right.
I remember when I became aware in the early 70s of Jerry Lewis' Labor Day weekend telethon for muscular dystrophy. Every year, they'd claim that they were close to a cure, right around the corner.
Here we are 50 years later, with vastly better technology, decades of additional research and trials, and yet no cure.
I find the idea of humans uploading consciousness into a computer cloud to be laughable.
Unless we become God. And then you're only repeating what He did with your brain.
With Meta's new personal development tools you too can be more like Mark Zuckerberg!
Bob Wright has two week-old 5 minute lectures on what everybody seems to be getting wrong about computers and consciousness
Lecture 1
Lecture 2
in either order. Scott Adams is the worst offender at the moment.
Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt. He no longer even remembered how it felt to have the ground so unthreateningly proximate.
Perry should have been born a Cocker Spaniel -- they're always small enough that falling doesn't hurt. Of course there's that neutering thing ...
Correct me if I'm wrong here, but my understanding of the Singularity is that it is a point in time when human societies can no longer adapt to the rate of tecnilogical change. Life extension by biological or mechanical means is a part of that, but a small one, and only as it applies to societal structures.
Kurzweil defines it as the point we reach true AI. Vinge more as society changes.
Consciousness transfer is less likely than fusion reactors.
Now that's a post when you can start by talking about the metaverse and the Singularity, and end up with Franzen, Joyce, and Melville.
A few years ago I read a book by James Barrat called, "Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era". It was a very real and frightening book (to me) about the growth of computing capability and what happens when computers learn to learn? Not at the levels they are now, but accelerated at exponentially increased levels of speed and breadth? This book did not talk about the melding of human and machine. It talked the more real and seemingly obvious situation of what happens when computers that can learn, know more than we do?
They don't sleep. They don't stop. They are programmed to continue to work out problems, and...when they can learn & grow, what happens when they speed past us in intelligence? This will happen. But what happens when it does? Do they then view us as we would a caterpillar crawling across your floor? A nuisance or something too inocuous to even bother with? Or, would they view us as a danger to them, or the surroundings (i.e. the environment)?
This was not all supposition. The book was filled with interviews and research from those in the field. I read that in 2013. Tech moves quickly. My mind says that we won't even realize when we're at the cusp of this and it'll just happen, while we are playing in the metaverse, developing new TikTok videos, and shouting down each other on blogs.
It's gonna happen. Facebook will mean nothing. Metaverse? It's a nothing burger compared to the future of machines. Treat your computer with respect. You may need brownie points some day. Not that machines feel. They're like government bureaucrats, but with brains and purpose.
"Metempsychosis" doesn't appear, but Wordsworth's "Intimations" ode movingly evokes the child's inexplicable urge to grow up:
Behold the Child among his new-born blisses,
A six years' Darling of a pigmy size!
See, where 'mid work of his own hand he lies,
Fretted by sallies of his mother's kisses,
With light upon him from his father's eyes!
See, at his feet, some little plan or chart,
Some fragment from his dream of human life,
Shaped by himself with newly-learn{e}d art
A wedding or a festival,
A mourning or a funeral;
And this hath now his heart,
And unto this he frames his song:
Then will he fit his tongue
To dialogues of business, love, or strife;
But it will not be long
Ere this be thrown aside,
And with new joy and pride
The little Actor cons another part;
Filling from time to time his "humorous stage"
With all the Persons, down to palsied Age,
That Life brings with her in her equipage;
As if his whole vocation
Were endless imitation.
The most interesting aspect in the article is that they actually call it Meta, not Facebook.
Uploading your consciousness will never be a thing because it will never be possible to prove that it worked and you're not just dead.
Temujin said...They don't sleep. They don't stop. They are programmed to continue to work out problems, and...when they can learn & grow, what happens when they speed past us in intelligence?
Never mind how smart they get, I'll start to worry when they can win at poker or can understand and make jokes.
"Here we are 50 years later, with vastly better technology, decades of additional research and trials, and yet no cure."
Chris Rock addressed this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ioW1YUDl5yk
We have already reached singularity. It's called Google. Go ahead, ask me anything.
There are a lot of meanings for "singularity," but I think the one in question is what is listed at Wikipedia as "technological singularity":
"The technological singularity—or simply the singularity—is a hypothetical point in time at which technological growth becomes uncontrollable and irreversible, resulting in unforeseeable changes to human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, called intelligence explosion, an upgradable intelligent agent will eventually enter a "runaway reaction" of self-improvement cycles, each new and more intelligent generation appearing more and more rapidly, causing an "explosion" in intelligence and resulting in a powerful superintelligence that qualitatively far surpasses all human intelligence. The first to use the concept of a "singularity" in the technological context was John von Neumann. Stanislaw Ulam reports a discussion with von Neumann "centered on the accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue".... he concept and the term "singularity" were popularized by Vernor Vinge in his 1993 essay The Coming Technological Singularity, in which he wrote that it would signal the end of the human era, as the new superintelligence would continue to upgrade itself and would advance technologically at an incomprehensible rate. He wrote that he would be surprised if it occurred before 2005 or after 2030."
But there is a part of this that's about human immortality:
"In his 2005 book, The Singularity is Near, Kurzweil suggests that medical advances would allow people to protect their bodies from the effects of aging, making the life expectancy limitless. Kurzweil argues that the technological advances in medicine would allow us to continuously repair and replace defective components in our bodies, prolonging life to an undetermined age. Kurzweil further buttresses his argument by discussing current bio-engineering advances. Kurzweil suggests somatic gene therapy; after synthetic viruses with specific genetic information, the next step would be to apply this technology to gene therapy, replacing human DNA with synthesized genes.... According to Richard Feynman, it was his former graduate student and collaborator Albert Hibbs who originally suggested to him (circa 1959) the idea of a medical use for Feynman's theoretical micromachines. Hibbs suggested that certain repair machines might one day be reduced in size to the point that it would, in theory, be possible to (as Feynman put it) "swallow the doctor". The idea was incorporated into Feynman's 1959 essay There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom. Beyond merely extending the operational life of the physical body, Jaron Lanier argues for a form of immortality called "Digital Ascension" that involves "people dying in the flesh and being uploaded into a computer and remaining conscious.""
So I don't think Zuckerman got it wrong.
Meh. I'm old enough to remember when a chess master took a famous bet that in ten years, no computer would be able to beat him. He scoffed, and he won.
Now it's easy to find a computer that can give odds to the best grandmaster in the world. No longer even close.
Much more recently, it was silly to imagine that a computer could safely drive a car. Or do a decent job translating.
Lots of things are hard, and seemingly impossible. Until they aren't.
If the singularity ever really arrives, how will we know it hadn't arrived a long, long, long time ago?
metempsychosis
Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt.
I was actually thinking about this exact thing yesterday. Well, not being close the the ground; but being light enough and young enough, that dropping a motorcycle and sliding on the pavement was kinda fun (sliding not hitting something)
If you had leathers on (and, were 20 years old); you'd just pick up your bike and get the Hell out of there.
Now the thought of just hitting the ground makes my bones hurt
In Christopher Marlowe's "The Tragical History of Dr Faustus": Faustus is dying, waiting for the devil Mephistopheles to come and claim his soul. And his wish: "Ah, Pythagoras'metempsychosis, were that time, This soul should fly from me, and I be changed Unto some brutish beast..." But, too late!
"Watching him fall down and pick himself back up, Perry mourned no longer being small enough that falling didn’t hurt."
That's why it's a heck of a lot easier to learn to ski when you are five years old than even when you are fifteen years old!
"Get me a functional mechanical pancreas that can actually manage my chronic disease as well as I manage it with insulin shots and then maybe we can talk about uploading my consciousness into silicon."
I've spent most of my career in the biotech/pharma industry. It is pretty routine for engineers and tech startup folks to decide they are ready to revolutionize medicine by applying "simple" engineering/AI techniques to biological problems. They manage to get some VCs to invest, they get some splashy press coverage, and then they disappear into the gaping maw of biological complexity, usually never to be heard from again. There is a real belief among some of them that the MDs and PhDs working in medical research are hidebound mediocrities who just don't understand the power of "digital." It's hard to convey the sheer, overwhelmingly irregular, inconsistent mess that is biology. In my experience, even academic biologists vastly underestimate the complexity of the systems they spend their lives studying. Frankly, sometimes I think it's amazing that any of our medical treatments work!
Kurzweil suggests that medical advances would allow people to protect their bodies from the effects of aging, making the life expectancy limitless. Kurzweil argues that the technological advances in medicine would allow us to continuously repair and replace defective components in our bodies, prolonging life to an undetermined age.
It's an interesting notion, at least in the sense that we are constantly replacing the molecules that make up our bodies (including our brains), but we have a sense of continuous consciousness, even though very little of what composed our bodies when we were ten is still there even by our twenties. We still perceive ourselves to remain ourselves, even though most of "ourself" has been replaced with new stuff.
If we ever do get to the point of uploading ourselves, whatever that might mean, I think Lanier's digital ascension idea is the more accurate picture. We die, and what gets uploaded is a copy. I have a feeling that any such uploaded intelligences will be far less "happy" with cyber-immortality than the original biological entities are likely hoping. My bet is it will be a lot closer to hell than heaven.
Sort of related: In Star Trek, people would hop into a transporter device where they would be broken down into data, then streamed to a receiver, and reconstituted as matter. Every time someone willingly stepped into a transporter, they basically were committing suicide, and every transporter engineer was, at best, a euthanasist. No?
I am curious how the author "showed" the boy to be a genius. I strongly suspect some well disguised 'telling" went on.
The only writer I remember convincingly showing a character to be a genius is maybe Anthony Burgess in the Enderby novels, or maybe Matt Groening in Futurama.
Yancey Ward said...
If the singularity ever really arrives, how will we know it hadn't arrived a long, long, long time ago?
That is the problem.
The people who make the decisions leading to this break point are morally deficient.
Our best hope is that augmented humans can keep up with pure electronic agents and retain enough humanity to look out for the naturals.
The best option is a butlerian jihad but that probably wont happen. All you have to do is read this thread to see that people who don't know what is going on are not taking this seriously. In their ignorance they offer snark and bravado.
If that end comes it will not be pleasant. It will be delivered completely absent of empathy. There wont be any resistance like the terminator series. We are much larger and much less durable and survivable than mosquitos. We will be much easier to wipe out.
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