[I_Like_Plants]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('TheDude', '
')The first analogy that came to mind is a cop being ordered to taser themselves, before they'll allowed to carry one. Doesn't convey what you're talking about though, I don't think. Didn't someone mention how a human has go through a multi-year growing process? I'd hate to be around a strong AI in the Terrible Twos!
Indeed I'm free to whatever I want right now - clean house, press the Submit button (DON'T DO IT!), anything. It's strange to imagine an AI interacting with [s]the rest of [/s]humanity (little anthropomorphization slip there), trying to solve its problems. I know it would immediately have all the answers, how would it impose them?
Baffling stuff. I came across an interesting term today, "steady-state economy." Yep, Einstein's biggest mistake ever applied to the world. Well, sort of. Actually, not so, according to its proponents. Permaculture writ large. That's the Utopia you hear a lot about here.

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('purcatty', 'W')e won't get to AI, not enough time.

[tmazanec1]

The part about the Terrible Twos reminds me of a story called "It's a GOOD Life". Included in a special treasury of best SF of all, and made into the best (IMHO) old "Twilight Zone" show (starring Bill Mumy).
An omnipotent child (Anthony) is born. He is afraid of the outside, so everything but his farming hamlet vanishes. It floats like the island of Laputa in a void. His mother spanks him for some disobediance. He strikes back with his mind, and she becomes a drooling idiot. He read the mind of a recent widow mourning, so he shambles the husband from the graveyard like a zombie. His father suggests he help the Smith's with a barnraising...he tries to, and the father is extra nice to their orphan because he feels responsible for what (unspecified) happened to the parents. He reads the mind of a man who brought something to the house and wanted to get away so Anthony would not see him...OK, his bicycle suddenly rides him home at 50 mph, his legs moving in a blur. Little Joey plays with Anthony one day...now no child is allowed near the house...older ones are told there is a nice gnome living there, but they must never go there. Younger ones are not told anything and just kept away. He hates singing, so when a man gets drunk at a birthday party and starts singing, Anthony turns him into a Jack-in the-box with his decapitated head bouncing up and down. When Anthony tries to help, it is horrible. And when he gets mad at you, it is infinitely worse. So everybody tells him how good he is and how wonderful he makes their life, doing favors like forcing everyone to watch meaningless moving blobs on television for hours (DON'T GET BORED!) or making it snow and killing all the crops (but it is good you did that). There were something like 120 people in the village when Anthony was born and it found itself like a Hindu turtle in the Sea of Infinity. By the time of the story when Anthony was eight, there were about 35 left. But it's a GOOD Life!

[TheDude]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('tmazanec1', 'T')he part about the Terrible Twos reminds me of a story called "It's a GOOD Life". Included in a special treasury of best SF of all, and made into the best (IMHO) old "Twilight Zone" show (starring Bill Mumy).

[roccman]

I'll bite Rsch20...

I'll now grant you the free energy fairy... She has solved all our liquid energy needs.

Just one twist...she does not address uncontrolled population growth of the human species.

Since I have granted you the energy fairy...you now must play a game with me...it really is quite a simple game...you tell me what number the world human population should be to manitain an equilibrium between natural resources and all animal species...here are the choices for this fairly simple game:



7 Billion

10 Billion

100 Billion

500 Billion

1 Trillion

100 Trillion

500 Trillion

Seeing as how your energy fairy can motor around any number of humans...the choice for you should be simple ...eh?

Then of course there is the twist (another one)...once you have picked a number ...please tell us how that number will be adhered to as to not exceed carrying capacity (for this fun little game we have not passed that threshold yet in 2007).

See..it has really never been about PO, GW, Food etc...it has always ever been about the population of the human species given we are a particularly rapacious breed.

[rsch20]

thanks for movin that over here rocc

I refuse to play your game based on the fact that I'm too ignorant to answer the question

I don't know what the planets ultimate carrying capacity is and am not foolish enough to guess. That is something I expect the Singularity (or lack therof) to resolve.

If it's truly just about the population of the species, things wouldn't look so glum, the 'Population Bomb' wasn't that big of a deal after all, developed countries slow their birth rates, the 'up and comers' are still expanding frightengly rapidly and us folks here in the US are using a disproportionate share of the resources, but if population were only the problem I wouldn't be very worried as we will hopefully naturally reach some equilibrium, even if it comes as a result of overshoot dieoff reducing us to a much smaller number, smaller is > zero.

As for humans being too fuxxed on a basic level, well that's a valid point, I'm hoping the singularity will help us lift ourselves out of our evolutionary baggage, and I think that if it doesn't happen, we will spiral into oblivion as has been predicted here time and again.

It is about GW, and PO, and the Singularity, and Population, and everything else, all rushing together towards some freakish climax.

[rsch20]

saw it years ago, but am still grasping for a fuller understanding. As I said in my other post look at my join date, I was a doomer before I joined, my join date just indicates the first day I had something to contribute.

But I included the Singularity in the freakish climax list. There's a shred of hope.

Incidentally I never went through a denial phase or any of the other 'steps' with Peak Oil, because I encountered the Singularity theory first. I had my 'steps' with that (though I was never in denial there either, but it was a worldview changing event), and that combined with my already being disillusioned with the world pretty much just elicited the 'yep, that makes sense' reaction from me.

[rsmithuf]

Is the technological singularity the savior to peak oil?

I found this site back in 2004 when oil prices hit.... <gasp> $40 a barrel for the first time in my life. Every so often, when gasoline prices are high, I always remember to check back to this site, but the concept of peak oil really never faded. And today, as we hover near $80 a barrel, I revisit the site, but with a new proposal to the darkness that is approaching.

We all will agree that we need to find solution(s) to peak oil far before it happens, while we still have somewhat affordable and easily accessible energy in which to perform these tasks. Spending an hour or less researching this task can prove to be heartbreaking, as the quest to find alternative replacements to fossil fuels is most agreeably one of the most difficult challenges humanity will ever face. Could we beat this dark future with some help, possibly……. artificial in nature?

I am an engineer, an electrical one at that. We are all familiar with Moore's law - the concept that transistor density can keep increasing by a factor of 2 every 18-24 months (or so). This increase in transistor density usually reveals itself to the end consumer in terms of a "faster" computer or a computer that is capable of performing more tasks simultaneously etc.
There are many in my field that believe this increase in performance will eventually cause the event known as the “technological singularity”, or the Singularity as I will refer to it from now on.

What is the Singularity? It is best described by statistician I.J. Good in 1965:
“Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that car far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be far left behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine (the Singularity) is the last invention that man need ever make.”

In movies, books, science fiction – there is little doubt that you have encountered the concept of the Singularity, in one way or the other. For example, let us examine the Terminator line of films. In these films, in the not-so-distant future, humanity has created a computer network called “SKYNET” which eventually becomes “self-aware.” It saw humanity as a threat and decided to use its military control to wipe humans out. A somewhat similar scene is played out in “The Matrix” films where a highly advanced artificial intelligence has enslaved the human race.

For the purposes of this discussion, let us assume that any Singularity we create and any subsequent machines will be non-hostile to the human race. Could we use the Singularity to rid us of our dependence on fossil fuels? A better question to ask might be: would it make more sense to spend research and the remaining “cheap” fossil fuel energy into developing the Singularity than it would be on alternatives, with the end goal of having “it” solve our problems (and many many others) for us? A majority of engineers and scientists believe the Singularity is likely happen before 2050 at our current technological progress. Do we have enough fossil fuels to maintain current economic growth and progress of the world before the Singularity arrives? The answer to this question is debatable but probably not.

Another positive example of the Singularity is this:
If humans ever discover a cure for cancer, that discovery will ultimately be traceable to the rise of human intelligence, so it is not absurd to ask whether a superintelligence could deliver a cancer cure in short order. If anything, creating superintelligence only for the sake of curing cancer would be swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. In that sense it is probably unreasonable to visualize a significantly smarter-than-human intelligence as wearing a white lab coat and working at an ordinary medical institute doing the same kind of research we do, only better, in order to solve cancer specifically as a problem. For example, cancer can be seen as a special case of the more general problem "The cells in the human body are not externally programmable." This general problem is very hard from our viewpoint – it requires full-scale nanotechnology to solve the general case – but if the general problem can be solved it simultaneously solves cancer, spinal paralysis, regeneration of damaged organs, obesity, many aspects of aging, and so on. Or perhaps the real problem is that the human body is made out of cells or that the human mind is implemented atop a specific chunk of vulnerable brain – although calling these problems raises philosophical issues not discussed here.

Singling out "cancer" as the problem is part of our culture's particular outlook and technological level. But if cancer or any generalization of "cancer" is solved soon after the rise of smarter-than-human intelligence, then it makes sense to regard the quest for the Singularity as a continuation by other means of the quest to cure cancer. The same could be said of ending world hunger, curing Alzheimer's disease, or placing on a voluntary basis many things which at least some people would regard as undesirable: illness, destructive aging, human stupidity, short lifespans. Maybe death itself will turn out to be curable, though that would depend on whether the laws of physics permit true immortality. At the very least, the citizens of a post-Singularity civilization should have an enormously higher standard of living and enormously longer lifespans than we see today.

How can the Singularity happen?
One idea that is often discussed along with the Singularity is the proposal that, in human history up until now, it has taken less and less time for major changes to occur. Life first arose around three and half billion years ago; it was only eight hundred and fifty million years ago that multi-celled life arose; only sixty-five million years since the dinosaurs died out; only five million years since the hominid family split off within the primate order; and less than a hundred thousand years since the rise of Homo sapiens in its modern form. Agriculture was invented ten thousand years ago; Socrates lived two and half thousand years ago; the printing press was invented five hundred years ago; the computer was invented around sixty years ago. You can't set a speed limit on the future by looking at the pace of past changes, even if it sounds reasonable at the time; history shows that this method produces very poor predictions. From an evolutionary perspective it is absurd to expect major changes to happen in a handful of centuries, but today's changes occur on a cultural timescale, which bypasses evolution's speed limits. We should be wary of confident predictions that transhumanity will still be limited by the need to seek venture capital from humans or that Artificial Intelligences will be slowed to the rate of their human assistants .

This concept can be visualized if we compiled a list of key events (or paradigm shifts) in human history and plotted them on a logarithmic graph – it shows an exponential trend as shown in Figure 1 below (courtesy Wikipedia).



Furthermore, we can see that this exponential trend continues if we examine computer technologies, starting from electromechanical components all the way to today’s modern transistor. Figure 2 shows a plot of calculations per second per $1,000 verse time (courtesy Wikipedia).



I believe it would be a safe bet that the Singularity will occur, IF we can sustain fossil supplies to fuel our world and economy to hold out just a little while longer.

My proposal is this: maybe we should drop all the effort and fossil energy finding somewhat unrealistic “alternative” energy sources that we, as humans, can conceive of and instead work towards achieving the Singularity – our inevitable future anyways, with what we have left.

If there is interest in debating this, please contribute. I would enjoy contributing more to this subject. If you are interested, you invite you to read more at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
http://www.singinst.org/overview/whywor ... ingularity

[chakra]

It's neat to think in the high science fiction sort of way but ignoring a serious situation and hoping that some future technology will not even save us from it, but will come up with the idea of a technology to save us, is stretching it I think.

I'd like to meet the person that figures out how to program creativity with the processing power of a computer. Even if you had computers millions of times faster then today's the problem of programing sentience is a hard one for me to wrap my head around. It will definitely take a jump in human understanding and programming to pull that off. I've pondered complex artificial intelligence while bored and making it work in today's programming languages is really hard.

[Carlhole]

It's an interesting idea. I've read Kurzweil's last two books and posted a couple of threads about the Singularity, etc. But people don't want to hear it.

You'll find there is a powerful neo-Luddite current running around these forums that reject a fascination for high technology. I'm surprised no one cheap-shotted you on your post.

I appreciate very much the threat that Peak Oil represents but I'm still reluctant to claim to know beyond doubt that the future holds the Olduvai Gorge scenario for Mankind. I simply do not claim to know what the future holds at all. And I don't underestimate human ingenuity (many around here have nothing but contempt for human ingenuity).

PeakOilers, Doomers in particular, are certain beyond certain that the near future holds the collapse of civilization as we know it - and they're pretty much talking about "40 acres and a mule" for the survivors - so to bring up The Singularity concept is to challenge their basic assumptions about the future.

But maybe since you are a new kid, they're giving you a courteous break!

[ohanian]

Technological Singularity is a joke!

I'm surprised that you fell for that.


Think about the human population chart, because of the discovery of oil, you might as well talk about


Human Population Singularity


If you think about it logically, at some point in the near future, it will hit one or more natural constraints for BOTH Human Population Singularity and Technological Singularity.

Only fools believe in unending growth.


Now this is what I think would happen.

Technological progress requires research.

Research requires researchers

Researchers requires PHD

PHD requires years of learning

Years of learning requires time and money


A day shall come where to get a PHD, you need to commit more years of learning than is available to a human being.

That is a natural constraint. Unless medicine improves the human lifespan to 120 years. The research would hit a natural constraint.

[Carlhole]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('chakra', 'I')t's neat to think in the high science fiction sort of way but ignoring a serious situation and hoping that some future technology will not even save us from it, but will come up with the idea of a technology to save us, is stretching it I think.

I'd like to meet the person that figures out how to program creativity with the processing power of a computer. Even if you had computers millions of times faster then today's the problem of programing sentience is a hard one for me to wrap my head around. It will definitely take a jump in human understanding and programming to pull that off. I've pondered complex artificial intelligence while bored and making it work in today's programming languages is really hard.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ohanian', '
')A day shall come where to get a PHD, you need to commit more years of learning than is available to a human being.

[Judgie]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Plantagenet', '')$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('ohanian', '
')A day shall come where to get a PHD, you need to commit more years of learning than is available to a human being.

[Judgie]

....