On 9/24/06, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Anyway, I am curious if anyone would like to share experiences they've had trying to get Singularitarian concepts across to ordinary (but let's assume college-educated) Joes out there. Successful experiences are valued but also unsuccessful ones. I'm specifically interested in
Personally, I've noticed that the opposition to a thought of Singularity falls into two main camps: 1) Sure, we might get human-equivalent hardware in the near future, but we're still nowhere near having the software for true AI. 2) We might get a Singularity within our lifetimes, but it's just as likely to be a rather soft takeoff and thus not really *that* big of an issue - life-changing, sure, but not substantially different from the development of technology so far. The difficulty with arguing against point 1 is that, well, I don't know all that much that'd support me in arguing against it. I've had some limited success with quoting Kurzweil's "brain scanning resolution is constantly getting better" graph and pointing out that we'll become able of doing a brute-force simulation at some point, but as for anything more elegant, not much luck. Moore's Law seems to work somewhat against point 2, but people often question how long we can assume it to hold.
approaches, metaphors, focii and so forth that have actually proved successful at waking non-nerd, non-SF-maniac human beings up to the idea that this idea of a coming Singularity is not **completely** absurd...
Myself, I've recently taken a liking to the Venus flytrap metaphor I stole from Robert Freitas' Xenopsychology. To quote my in-the-works introductory essay to the Singularity (yes, it seems to be in-the-works indefinitely - short spurts of progress, after which I can't be bothered to touch it for months at a time): "In his 1984 paper Xenopsychology [3], Robert Freitas introduces the concept of Sentience Quotient for determining a mind's intellect. It is based on the size of the brain's neurons and their information-processing capability. The dumbest possible brain would have a single neuron massing as much as the entire universe and require a time equal to the age of the universe to process one bit, giving it an SQ of -70. The smartest possible brain allowed by the laws of physics, on the other hand, would have an SQ of +50. While this only reflects pure processing capability and doesn't take into account the software running on the brains, it's still a useful rough guideline. So what's this have to do with artificial intelligences? Well, Freitas estimates Venus flytraps to have an SQ of +1, while most plants have an SQ of around -2. The SQ for humans is estimated at +13. Freitas estimates electronic sentiences that can be built to have an SQ of +23 - making the difference of us and advanced AIs <i>nearly as high as between humans and Venus flytraps</i>. It should be obvious that when compared to this, even the smartest humans would stand no chance against the AI's intellect - any more than we should be afraid of a genius carnivorous plant suddenly developing a working plan for taking over all of humanity." http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tspro1/Esitys/009.png has the same compressed in a catchy presentation slide (some of the text is in Finnish, but you ought to get the gist of it anyway). ----- 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]
