Do you any of you all look into the technological Singularity issue? It is a fascinating subject.

Here is a good site on the subject http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=1

and an outstanding book http://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Near-Humans-Transcend...0446?ie=UTF8&s=books

Is that when computers will come alive and think for themselves? I can't recall if this is how Kurweil explained it, or maybe it was Vernor Vinge?

I think the singularity is also a term used to describe the center of a black hole.

I remember listening to both Kurzweil and Vinge on one of my favorite science podcasts,Are We Alone?

Here are the links:

The Singularity (Kurzweil)

Robot Uprising (Vinge)

This book is on my summer reading list. I think its definitely an interesting examination of the implications of a convergence between our biological components and selves with technology. I think its a fascinating angle for an ontological study.

I'd been wanting to respond to this for quite some time now... but did not feel like I had the words to adequately convey my rejection of this idea... until I found this:


Here is the link:

Link


I was thinking about how unlikely a singularity of technological "life" so to speak would happen...

The only terms that came to mind were the "organic"; "metal"; and "forced/controlled energy"...

all inadequate terms... and I just wanted to scream ..... because it is frustrating to not be able to communicate thoughts...

until I found this guys article and smacked my head at the first heading "tools and agents" DOH!

I really agree with the bolded parts... I love his explanation and particularly liked his analogy of downloading music needing a tool compared to simply hearing music

Tools vs. Agents



In comparing the predictions that turned out to be conservative with the predictions that turned out to be optimistic, I detect a clear pattern. Generally speaking, the more open-ended the problem and the more adaptive that the machine needs to be to provide a solution, the less far along we are in arriving at a technological solution. One way to put this is that we can construct tools, but we cannot construct agents.



A tool is a device that performs specific, easily predicted behaviors in response to a given set of possible stimuli. A tool takes information from a human, rather than directly from the environment. A human must adjust to provide "input" to the tool, rather than having the tool respond to natural human behavior. A tool follows a well-specified set of steps in formulating its response to stimuli. The tool's behavioral rules can be reverse-engineered relatively easily.



An agent is a device that can adapt to new stimuli and produce unexpected responses. An agent can take autonomous readings of the environment. It can interpret natural human behavior. An agent adapts and changes its behavior. Its behavioral patterns are difficult to reverse engineer.



I doubt that one can draw a clear dividing line between tools and agents. There probably are some devices that might be difficult to classify. However, at the extremes, the distinction seems reasonably easy to draw. Downloading music wirelessly to a personal communication device requires a tool. Creating a resonance between the user's brain waves and the music being listened to requires an agent. A virtual-reality cadaver for a doctor is a tool. A real-time medical consultation assistant would be an agent.



Today's cars are complex tools. That is, a car is a tool that is made up of many individual tools. However, the car is not an agent. The driver still does most of the work of processing environmental stimuli and adapting to the situation. Kurzweil's intelligent highway, in which the car acts as an agent, seems to me to be a lot farther in the future than 2009.



A keyboard is a tool. A speech-recognition system is an agent. Speech recognition has been a "promising" and "improving" technology for decades, but it perpetually falls short. I used to call it a Red Sox technology, except that as of last October the Red Sox no longer are a metaphor for championship-level futility.



The Learning Factor



As I wrote in On Intelligence, People, and Computers, human beings far exceed machines in terms of learning capacity, because we develop generic pattern-recognition skills in response to our sensory environment:



"I think that the key to getting any machine to learn is to give it a variety of both stimuli to absorb and tasks to perform. Moreover, it is important to have the machine synthesize its knowledge, rather than use a separate program for each task."



Until we can build machines that learn, we will not be able to construct agents with the skills to recognize speech, translate languages, and transact business on our behalf. I am bullish on the prospects for building better and better tools, but I am bearish on the outlook for building effective agents.



If the challenge is to synthesize a large diamond, then we can get from here to there using tools. The bets that I would make against Kurzweil are where his predictions presume that we can develop agents.



Arnold Kling is the author of Learning Economics

Very nice article but its a little bit off base. The book isn't about spontaneous intelligence emerging from machines. Though I think it is possible for machines to someday think beyond how the article makes them out to be entirely dependent on the input we give them. Like genetic code, I think with the proper research machines could might become self-aware but thats an debate for another topic. The book's full title is The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

A nice synopsis from Amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist"”a large-minded one at that"”and gives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince"”given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable"”but the degree to which it seems downright plausible. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

( Source - Amazon.com

The author is suggesting that we will be combined with technology and will go beyond our biological limits. Immortality, Improved Cognative Function, Versitile and become something beyond what we would become naturally. The course he seems to examine in his book outlines a lot of questions of morality, social and political implications and maybe some religious aspects.

quote:

Originally posted by Nobody:
Very nice article but its a little bit off base. The book isn't about spontaneous intelligence emerging from machines. Though I think it is possible for machines to someday think beyond how the article makes them out to be entirely dependent on the input we give them. Like genetic code, I think with the proper research machines could might become self-aware but thats an debate for another topic. The book's full title is The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology

A nice synopsis from Amazon.com:

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Renowned inventor Kurzweil (The Age of Spiritual Machines) may be technology's most credibly hyperbolic optimist. Elsewhere he has argued that eliminating fat intake can prevent cancer; here, his quarry is the future of consciousness and intelligence. Humankind, it runs, is at the threshold of an epoch ("the singularity," a reference to the theoretical limitlessness of exponential expansion) that will see the merging of our biology with the staggering achievements of "GNR" (genetics, nanotechnology and robotics) to create a species of unrecognizably high intelligence, durability, comprehension, memory and so on. The word "unrecognizable" is not chosen lightly: wherever this is heading, it won't look like us. Kurzweil's argument is necessarily twofold: it's not enough to argue that there are virtually no constraints on our capacity; he must also convince readers that such developments are desirable. In essence, he conflates the wholesale transformation of the species with "immortality," for which read a repeal of human limit. In less capable hands, this phantasmagoria of speculative extrapolation, which incorporates a bewildering variety of charts, quotations, playful Socratic dialogues and sidebars, would be easier to dismiss. But Kurzweil is a true scientist"”a large-minded one at that"”and gives due space both to "the panoply of existential risks" as he sees them and the many presumed lines of attack others might bring to bear. What's arresting isn't the degree to which Kurzweil's heady and bracing vision fails to convince"”given the scope of his projections, that's inevitable"”but the degree to which it seems downright plausible. (Sept.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

( Source - Amazon.com

The author is suggesting that we will be combined with technology and will go beyond our biological limits. Immortality, Improved Cognative Function, Versitile and become something beyond what we would become naturally. The course he seems to examine in his book outlines a lot of questions of morality, social and political implications and maybe some religious aspects.

So this isn't so much about machines as it is human "enhancement" through the use of technology?

yea, another potential can of worms haha