Hi,
The reason that so many in the intellectual community see Singularity discussion as garbage is because there is so little definitional consensus that it's close to impossible to determine what's actually being discussed.
I doubt this... I think the reason that Singularity discussion is disrespected is that, no matter how you work the specifics of the definition, it all seems science-fictional to most people... and we Singularitarians are disrespected for taking sci-fi speculation too seriously (instead of focusing on money and family, getting a haircut and getting a real job, etc. etc. ;-)
The basic Singularity concept is incredibly mundane. In the midst of all this futuristic excitement, we sometimes forget this. A single genetically engineered child born with a substantially smarter-than-human IQ would constitute a Singularity, because we would have no ability to predict the specifics of what it would do, whereas we have a much greater ability to predict the actions of typical humans.
I think this is not necessarily true. a) A very superordinarily smart genetically engineered child could well waste all its time playing five-dimensional chess, or World of Warcraft for that matter ... it could then wind up being pretty easy to predict. Similarly, the emergence of an Einstein on a planet of human retards (er, "differently intellectually advantaged" indviduals...) would not necessarily be a Singularity type event for that planet. The alien Einstein might well just stay in the corner meditating and theorizing.... b) I find it very unlikely, but I can imagine a Singularity scenario in which there is strong nanotech plus a host of highly powerful narrow AI programs, but no artificial general intelligence beyond the human level. This could result in massive transformations of reality as we know it, at an incredibly rapid rate, yet with no superhuman intelligence. This would be a Kurzweilian Singularity, and whether it would be a Vingean Singularity comes out to depend on the particularities of how one disambiguates the natural language concept of "intelligence"... I happen to think that the emergence of superhuman, rapidly self-improving AI **is** what is going to characterize the Singularity ... but, I don't agree that this is the only species of Singularity worth talking or thinking about... -- Ben ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
