Glen -
All good fun, meat, empty calories and silly talk alike...
I realized near the end of your last post that we are not even really
talking about the same thing.
I discounted machine intelligence and the transference of the human mind
(if not soul??? whatever that wold mean) into hardware immediately when
I began reading Singularian stuff a couple of decades ago. So I'm not
even talking about that. I just realized how misleading it must have
been to imagine that I was?
What I'm talking about is the (as yet to be identified in quality?)
human experience of accelerated technology. The fact that Kurzweil and
Co turn it into life extension (in one's own body, albeit enhanced and
prostheticized to the max) and ascendence into "the cloud" is a tangent
for me. The (much) softer version involves "who do we become as we
assimilate or become assimilated by these new technologies?".
The Amish took a tack about a century ago that discounted the value of
the advancing technology to their selves and their communities. They
chose to ask "who do I become if I adopt this new technology" each time
something was presented to them and generally the answer was roughly
"nobody I want to be".
I don't discount the possibility of machine intelligence or even
ultimately the possibility of download/upload of the human "mind" but it
does seem highly problematic and the issues not as easily swept under as
the Kurzweilian Singularians would imply. *I* am not holding *my*
breath waiting. And I expect that even if it comes about, the early
nanoseconds will look pretty Frankensteinianly Nightmarish by any
standard and the later picoseconds will be completely unrecognizeable to
mere humans such as myself.
I get a little befuddled about metrics (partly based on what you are
calling theory-laden) on this topic because they always seem to deserve
some normalization. As you suggest, the rate of patent generation is
not a simple nor clear measure of innovation, in fact there may be some
negative corrolation today. Similarly with refereed publications.
There is probably some model of the number of humans on the planet, the
number of them with mathematical skills above a certain level (geometry
and algebra if not trigonometry and calculus?), the number with access
to "modern" technology (
Steve Smith wrote at 05/16/2013 02:45 PM:
We are on (yet another) cusp... are you denying the cusp?
I am denying the evidence for the cusp (though not necessarily the cusp,
itself). I'm a skeptic, which means I'm interested in whatever evidence
you think you have. As such, you rightly focus on the measures. What
are the measures?
To me, all observations are theory-laden. And that means that no matter
what measures you choose, they will be biased to reflect (in some way,
directly or inversely) the perspective from which they arose. Let's
consider the ones you list above:
o Number of patents over time.
o Number of articles in tech journals over time.
o Number of consumer products over time.
What is a patent? Is it a reflection of novelty? Or is it a reflection
of the social-legal-political structure by which (some of us) make
money? (I changed "new ideas or devices" to articles because measuring
"new" vs. warmed over old seems problematic, as does distinguishing an
idea or device from the paper on which it's described.) Do these
articles exist as a result of the ideas or devices? Or is the
cause-effect actually reversed, do the ideas/devices exist because of
the articles? Or, more likely, are they independent processes? I.e.
there aren't more/accelerating new ideas and devices now than there were
10,000 years ago. It's just that _now_ we publish articles on our new
ideas and devices, whereas before we did not. In fact, one might make
the argument that _now_, tech progression has _slowed_ because
documenting them in articles and IP ownership forces the inventor to
scour stacks of paper instead of spending time inventing. Same
arguments apply with consumer products. Is it that there are more
products changing our lives? Or is it simply that any particular
product is more widespread, homogenous across a larger clique, so that
we _think_ there are more products when there may actually be fewer?
^^^^^^^ here ends the meat, only empty calories below ^^^^^^^
One
could easily make the analogy to Catholicism, where many Catholics (most
that I know) don't really believe in Transubstantiation ... or even the
Trinity.
But they do like the idea of forgiveness on earth and a cushy life in
heaven? Or just the warm feeling of being well inside a herd?
The latter. The ones I know don't care about lofty nonsense like heaven
or forgiveness. They just do what they do because everyone around them
does it. I've noticed a similar trend with self-identified atheists.
Oh, I do understand (implicitly) the point that the authors don't
believe that the Singularians *have* evidence to support their beliefs.
I agree with a lot of the Singularians "beliefs" not just all of their
"conclusions".
Not quite. The Bringsjord et al argument isn't so much about there
being a lack of evidence. It's about the Singularity Hypothesis not
being _challengable_, or at least not well challenged, especially
amongst its proponents.
Summon Popper and the other dead white man ghosts! The point is that
the Singularians are not _rational_. They are reasoning based on
justificationism, one particularly egregious form of that being
faith-based reasoning.
So, is it that you would claim that there IS no bogey-man (technological
progress either doesn't exist or isn't in any way threatening?) or that
there *might be* but his reputation is overblown, or that it doesn't
matter because he exists, is part of our life, get over it? Or
something else entirely?
If you mean me, personally, then my answer is none of the above. I am
merely skeptical. The singularity argument is so ill-formed my
skeptical homunculus can jump in anywhere at any time.
A good question to ask a moron like me is: What would constitute
sufficient evidence to convince you? To that, my answer would be
something like this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biophilia_hypothesis
except the affinity felt would be with a _machine_, not what we
currently regard as life forms. In the end, it would have to be some
form of artificial life that piqued my empathy. If/when you can show me
such a machine, my skepticism will begin to wane. The device would have
to "take on a life of its own" in some sense that appealed to my
intuition. To convince _me_ (distinct from Bringsjord et al or anyone
else), that's where we should hunt for appropriate measures ... measures
that demonstrated progress in lifelike machines.
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