Well, many of the Singularity proponents do say that they are not taken
seriously in academia because of monkey politics, et cetera. To me, it
is a matter of incentives. Kurzweil's theory is more than *a* theory.
His theory is one of the bases of the arguments for Singularity. I
haven't seen a single theoretical development of the idea of Singularity
by any of the major proponents (Kurzweil, Vinge, Yudkowsky) that isn't
ridden with holes. I would have thought that the proponents of the view
would go back to fix the issues. But instead of the revise-and-resubmit
cycle in academia, non-academics have no incentive to fix problems in a
theory. Rather, they have an incentive to simply gather more data and
lay down the same argument as before. For example, here is a TED talk by
Kurzweil which also uses that infamous
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:PPTMooresLawai.jpg> graph :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QJsHRltEVBc&feature=related
I quite disagree with Kurzweil's claim that Moore's Law operated right
through the Great Depression. In some ways, I am very surprised that
somebody would even claim that the law has been in operation prior to
the Great Depression without providing great statistics for it
(Kurzweil's statistics on this aspect are quite weak). Extraordinary
claims require extraordinary proof.
=+=
As I noted before, prior to the rise of corporations, there is no reason
to believe that this "law" was operating any place any time. This is
because it is only the corporatization of innovation that proceeded
after the Second World War that seems to be part of the phenomenon of
"Moore's law". Specific technologies and the politics surround those (3D
printing, nanotechnologies, Water politics, Food politics, monkey
politics, etc.) are interesting, but the growth of these technologies
seem to be well modeled by traditional micro- and macro- economics, and
so while the discussion preceding was interesting, it does not change
the conclusions as far as I am concerned since all this is already
modeled quite well using traditional economics and traditional social
sciences.
I would go further and put a non-hypothetical model out there. Here is a
(non-hypothetical) model of AI. Because it is non-hypothetical, it
describes a situation that could actually arise out of the utilization
of artificial intelligence in modern technology. Here it is :
* Artificial Intelligence can be both a complement for human
productive activity as well as a substitute.
* In the beginning, as AI is less developed, it will act as a
complement for productive activity (spreadsheets, word processing).
Wages will go up as humans start becoming more productive (for a given X
number of work hours).
* As AI gets further developed, it will start becoming a substitute
for human productive activity (online travel sites as opposed to human
travel agents; online stock trading as opposed to human stock brokers;
online/computer tax software as opposed to human accountants).
Unemployment will increase as AIs start taking over some of the jobs of
humans.
* This may help answer one of the puzzles of the current economy. The
GDP of the world has continued to grow even as unemployment has
increased in many developed economies.
Anand
--- In silk-l...@yahoogroups.com, Eugen Leitl <eugen@...> wrote:
>
> On Mon, Feb 07, 2011 at 10:12:39PM -0000, Anand Manikutty wrote:
>
> > > I admit I looked for them, but unfortunately failed to find any.So
you
> > are saying that this graph by Kurzweil is actually right? I assumed
that
>
> No, I think Kurzweil is at least guilty of serious cherry-picking.
>
> > the silliness of the graph would be obvious. Please do describe in
your
> > own words why Kurzweil's graph is actually correct.
>
> I do not see why I have to address your strawman. Positive feedback
> loop dynamics do not have to follow a straight semilog plot to produce
> interesting behaviour.
>
> > Also, I had a rather through refutation of Yadkowsky's point on
> > communism. What is your rejoinder to this exactly?>
>
> It's Yudkowsky, and I do not see any relevance of monkey politics
> to what is driven by nonhuman agents of widely dispersed complexity
> and operating on widely spread time scales.
>
> > > > My claim is : there is just no reason to believe (based on the
> > evidence
> > > > presented by Yudkowsky, Vinge and Kurzweil) that a singularity
could
> > > > happen. A singularity is still very hypothetical (more or less
in
> > the
> > > > realm of science fiction).
> > >
> > > Why, so is everything. Until it isn't.
> > > I fail to see the point here. This is too vague to merit a
response
> > from me.
>
> Most of things you see around you are artificial in origin, and
> were first represented as an activity pattern in the space
> between somebody's ears. Everything was 'science fiction' once,
> so that label is not particularly predictive.
>
> > Anand
> > P.S. More here :
> >
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/indo-euro-americo-asian_list/message/223
> --
> Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org";>leitl</a> http://leitl.org
> ______________________________________________________________
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