Joshua Fox wrote:
Could I offer Singularity-list readers this intellectual challenge:
Give an argument supporting the thesis "Any sort of Singularity is
very unlikely to occur in this century."
Even if you don't actually believe the point, consider it a
debate-club-style challenge. If there is already something on the web
somewhere, could you please point me to it.
I've been eager for this piece ever since I learned of the Singularity
concept. I know of the "objections" chapter in Kurzweil's
Singularity is Near, the relevant parts of Vinge's seminal essay, as
well the ideas of Lanier, Huebner, and a few others, but in all the
millions of words out there I can't remember seeing a well-reasoned
article with the above claim as its major thesis. (Note, I'm looking
for "why the Singularity won't happen" rather than "why the
Singularity is a bad idea" or "why technology is not accelerating".)
Joshua
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One obvious counterargument would be "We're going to blow ourselves up
this year."
It's one of those "I hope it's not true, but I sure couldn't prove it"
kind of arguments. (There are several of the same general nature.)
If any of these predict events that do come to pass, there will be an
extinction event, but hardly a singularity in the sense that we mean it.
If you predict that the singularity is n years in the future, then each
of these probabilities has to be escaped n times. There've been a few
times when I thought that 10 years was optimistic. Sometimes I didn't
know until afterwards (the Cuban Missile crisis, e.g.) just how narrow
an escape was had.
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