The Singularity [is] the future point at which artificial intelligence exceeds human intelligence, whereupon immediately thereafter (as the story goes) the machines make themselves rapidly smarter and smarter and smarter, reaching a superhuman level of intelligence that, stuck as we are in the mud of our limited mentation, we can’t fathom.
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
What’s easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there’s no generic “human intelligence”, just the intelligence of individual human beings.
Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.
Technological singularity, in other words, isn’t an objective phenomenon. It’s a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole’s event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.
Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can’t fathom what’s going on?
If so, we don’t have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.
And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...
And there seems to be a dilemma here:
Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable—and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...
Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.
Is your point that the world is already too complicated for all of us to understand, and singularity will only make it more so? Like, quantitatively it can all get a lot weirder, but the qualitative point of “no one really understands what’s going on anymore” has passed long ago? (Or perhaps there never was such moment that people understood how their world works.)
One man’s singularity is another man’s Tuesday:
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
What’s easy to overlook in the above definition is that in the real world there’s no generic “human intelligence”, just the intelligence of individual human beings.
Not all of us are thus going to experience singularity at the same time. Some of us will have to deal with it sooner, some later.
Technological singularity, in other words, isn’t an objective phenomenon. It’s a subjective thing. In reality, unlike in the simplistic model, it does not resemble the absolute, indisputable physical singularity at the center of a black hole. It is more like black hole’s event horizon, an imaginary border, a point of no return, through witch we pass, one at a time and often not even noticing.
Thinking about it in this way gives the discussion an empirical basis. We could ask: If the singularity is a subjective phenomenon, are there already people who have experienced it? Are there people for whom the world is already too fast-moving and too complex to follow? Are there people, who, stuck in the mud of their limited mentation, as Stanford Encyclopedia mercilessly puts it, can’t fathom what’s going on?
If so, we don’t have to guess how the post-singularity world will look like. We can just ask.
And yes, there are flat-earthers out there and there are conspirational theorists of all flavours, so we definitely have something to work with...
And there seems to be a dilemma here:
Either you believe that the world that is too fast and too complex to follow is still somehow tractable—and it that case you should prove it by taking a flat-earther and helping them to adopt a better model of the world...
Or you believe that changing their mind is impossible and then you have to worry that once you cross the technological event horizon yourself, you will get lost yourself, that you will become just a high-IQ version of a conspiration theorist.
Is your point that the world is already too complicated for all of us to understand, and singularity will only make it more so? Like, quantitatively it can all get a lot weirder, but the qualitative point of “no one really understands what’s going on anymore” has passed long ago? (Or perhaps there never was such moment that people understood how their world works.)