The (social) singularity is just the incremental cybernetic augmentations we made along the way...
On Mon, Nov 18, 2019 at 9:47 AM Matt Mahoney <mattmahone...@gmail.com> wrote: > The premise of the Singularity is that if humans can create smarter than > human intelligence (meaning faster or more successful at achieving goals), > then so can it, only faster. That will lead to an intelligence explosion > because each iteration will be faster. We cannot say how this will happen > because each iteration is only smart enough to know how to create the next > one. > > Vernor Vinge predicted in 1993 that the first iteration will happen around > 2023 and certainly between 2005 and 2030, and a Singularity will happen > perhaps within weeks or months after that. Kurzweil predicts 2045 based on > Moore's Law and computers surpassing the human brain's dozen petaflops or > so. > > The problems with this premise are: > > 1. It is human civilization, not a single human, that produces AGI. That > is a much higher threshold. > > 2. Intelligence depends on knowledge and computing power. Self improvement > is achieved by working to acquire computing power, which increases the > capacity to store and apply knowledge. Physics limits how fast this can > happen. We can calculate these limits many generations in advance. > > 3. We cannot learn faster than we can do experiments. For example, we know > very little about what interventions increase human longevity because > experiments take decades, regardless of Moore's law. > > The great paradigm shifts leading to human civilization are the inventions > of spoken language perhaps 200,000 years ago, writing 5000 years ago, and > communication and computing technology over the last century. The next ones > will be genetic engineering, nanotechnology, and artificial life to achieve > Kardashev level I, a Dyson sphere or cloud for level II, and interstellar > seeding for level III. > > Nanotechnology is necessary to overcome the power limitations of > transistors. Global computing capacity is about 10^20 bit operations per > second (BOPS) and 10^23 bits of storage. These have increased by a factor > of 10 every 5 years since 1950 but will soon stall because you cannot make > transistors smaller than the spacing between dopant atoms. Currently > transistors have feature sizes of 5 nm, which is 45 silicon atoms. > > A bit operation in transistors takes 10^-9 J. We know this because the > most power efficient supercomputers in the Green 500 list achieve 15 > gigaflops per watt. (One flop = 32 BOPS). This should double by the time > transistors stop shrinking around 2 nm. > > A synapse transmission takes 10^-15 J. We know that because there are 6 x > 10^-14 synapses in the human brain, which uses 20 W. I assume 10 bits per > second per synapse. > > Copying a bit of DNA or RNA (1/2 of a base) or transcribing protein (1/6 > of an amino acid) takes 10^-17 J. We know this because there are 10^37 bits > of DNA in the biosphere and a few hundred times more protein out of the > total biomass of 550 Pg (petagrams) of carbon and 50-100 Pg of nitrogen. > Global carbohydrate production by photosynthesis is 210 Pg of carbon, > equivalent to 500 Pg of carbohydrate at 4 Kcal = 16.5 KJ per gram, or a > total of 250 TW. > > By contrast, global fuel and electricity production is 15 TW. Human food > consumption is 100 W per person or 0.7 TW. The Earth intercepts 160,000 TW > of solar energy, of which 45% is blocked by the atmosphere, leaving 90,000 > TW. Thus, plants use 2.7% of available sunlight. We already have solar > panels that are 20-30% efficient. > > The computing capacity of the biosphere is 10^31 BOPS, mostly protein > synthesis, and 10^37 bits of DNA. A naïve projection of Moore's law > suggests that nanotechnology will surpass and possibly displace DNA based > life in the 2080's. > > The Landauer limit at room temperature is 3 x 10^-20 J per bit operation, > or 300 times better than biology. Moore's law suggests we will reach this > limit of 10^36 BOPS around 2110. Any further progress will require a Dyson > sphere to capture all of the sun's 3.8 x 10^26 W. This is higher by a > factor of 2 billion, or 46 years of Moore's law (2150's). The sun puts out > enough energy to lift all of the Earth's mass into space in about a week if > we could capture it all. Jupiter would take a century. Building a Dyson > sphere at 10,000 AU radius would cool the outer temperature to the CMB > background of 3K, reducing the Landauer limit by a factor of 100 to allow > 10^47 BOPS. > > Moore's law says 2160's, which I doubt. In any case, any further progress > would require either interstellar travel or speeding up the sun's output, > perhaps by dropping a black hole into it. Exponential growth will > eventually run into speed of light delays if nothing else. > > Regardless of what happens, the observable universe only has 10^53 Kg of > mass, or equivalently, 10^70 J of energy, enough to write 10^92 bits. > Quantum (reversible) operations return borrowed energy, but there is only > enough energy to perform 10^120 of those over the life of the universe > according to Seth Lloyd. A more precise limit is the Bekenstein bound on > the entropy contained in the Hubble radius, 2.95 x 10^122 bits. > > The future may be fantastic and unimaginable. But we already know that > physics doesn't allow a singularity. > > > *Artificial General Intelligence List <https://agi.topicbox.com/latest>* > / AGI / see discussions <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi> + > participants <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/members> + delivery > options <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription> Permalink > <https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T94ee05730c7d4074-M051ddc9207144b6672ad7c6c> > ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T94ee05730c7d4074-M43fb2a82a30e186fc2b0acf6 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
