{"id":258,"date":"2006-05-22T08:13:04","date_gmt":"2006-05-22T08:13:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/22\/unfinished-business\/"},"modified":"2006-05-22T08:13:04","modified_gmt":"2006-05-22T08:13:04","slug":"unfinished-business","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2006\/05\/22\/unfinished-business\/","title":{"rendered":"Unfinished Business"},"content":{"rendered":"

The problem with scheduling something like last week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger<\/a> for a time when I’m out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can’t hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the fold) to a couple of points that were raised in the comments, though, mostly having to do with my skepticism about the Singularity.<\/p>\n

(Side note on literary matters: When I wrote dismissively that the Singularity is a silly idea, I didn’t realize that I was going to spend the flight down to Knoxville on Tuesday reading and enjoyng Vernor Vinge’s latest, Rainbows End<\/cite>. Short review: even if people like Ray Kurzweril do silly things with his ideas, Vinge is a very sharp writer, and you should check this book out.)<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

There were really two comments I wanted to respond to that I didn’t have time to give the answers they deserve. First up was “Dr. Pain”:<\/p>\n

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“As PZ said, there’s no biological way for a population of six billion to be taken out in five generations…”<\/p>\n

Tell that to the passenger pigeons.<\/p>\n

Shift your argument around a bit: “In the next hundred years, we’re not only going to figure out how to build small computers that communicate wirelessly with a global network, but also do six billion procedures to provide those computers to every man, woman, and child now alive? I don’t think so.” And yet in about 20 years we’re more than halfway towards giving every adult alive a cell phone.<\/p>\n

The point of the Singularity is not how it ends, but rather that power of an ever-increasing rate of change. I don’t know where we’ll be in a hundred years, but I doubt it will be “more or less” the same as today’s world. (Heck, today’s world is arguably not the same as the world of 1900…)<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

First and foremost, there’s a big difference between mass extinction and evolution into a new form. The last passenger pigeon to die at human hands was more or less biologically identical to the first one. The claim that we won’t be around because we’ll all be wiped out by plagues or famines or global thermonuclear war is very different than the claim that our descendants will have transcended into something beyond our current definition of human. I don’t belive we’ll go extinct, either, as it happens (again, six billion plus individuals, spread over several continents and a host of different environments would be hard to wipe out completely), but that wasn’t the claim I was taking issue with there.<\/p>\n

Second, I don’t think the cell phone example is a good one at all. We might be halfway to getting every adult in the US, Europe, and Japan a cell phone, but I even doubt that. The vast bulk of humanity remains blissfully cell-phone-free. It’s a serious mistake to think that what happens in the wealthier parts of the wealthier nations is a good indicator of the general state of the species.<\/p>\n

Finally, as for the question of whether the world will be different a hundred years hence, of course it will. But that wasn’t the questons I was supposed to answer– what the Seed<\/cite> honchos asked was whether the human race will still be around in a hundred years. While it’s undeniably true that the world is a very different place than it was in 1906, I wouldn’t say that the human race had reall changed significantly in the last hundred years, or even the last thousand. People today are pretty much the same as people in the past, and will continue to be pretty much the same as they are now a hundred years from now.<\/p>\n

The second argument I wanted to discuss further is from Michael Nielsen:<\/p>\n

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Vinge’s core argument (on which he has several variations) seem to be very simple: <\/p>\n

(1) We can expect computers that exceed human intelligence in the relatively near future.<\/p>\n

(2) Once (1) occurs, on a very short timescale we should expect computers that enormously exceed human intelligence.<\/p>\n

(3) Point (2) will result in an enormous burst of change that will very rapidly change the entire world.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

As I said very hastily from Knoxville, I don’t really buy Step 1)– lots of people have said that AI is close lots of times in the past, and they haven’t been right. I think the concept of “intelligence” remains pretty slippery, so that it’s not even entirely clear what is meant by having computers exceed human intelligence, or how we’ll know when it happens. I don’t think it’s a sure thing that we’ll get something that everybody agrees is an intelligent computer in the near future– “intelligence” is not only a hard problem, it’s a moving target.<\/p>\n

The next step in the chain is the claim that once we have intelligent computers, they’ll very quickly make more intelligent computers, which will make more intelligent computers, and so on. Given that I think AI is a Hard Problem to beging with, I’m not sure I believe that this is a trivial step. I think the argument is that once we’ve figured out what makes a smart computer, either we or they will be able to leverage that into some unified theory of intelligence, that can be used to design the next step. That’s at least not a priori<\/i> foolish, but I’m a little skeptical that it will go quickly. <\/p>\n

The third step also has its problems. I’m not sure that the various problems we have are so much a matter of a lack of intelligence so much as a lack of resources<\/strong>, both physical and informational. To pick an example close to Michael’s field, we don’t have working quantum computers today not because of a lack of good ideas, but because of practical problems. The issue isn’t intelligence, it’s lack of information about the real parameters of real experiments– until you start making ion traps, you don’t really know what the decoherence rates will be like, or how difficult it will be to shuttle ions around in a trap, or any of the other technical hurdles that the experiments have hit over the years.<\/p>\n

To some degree, these are problems that can be (and are being) solved through applied intelligence– when a problem arises, somebody will find a clever way around it– but I don’t think that intelligence is really the bottleneck. The limiting factor in the growth of new technologies is not the ideas, but rather the practicalities. There’s a lot of grunt work involved in keeping science marching along, and that stuff takes time, even when you’ve already got good ideas to work with. The essential assumption of step three in the Singularity argument is that having more intelligent computers working on the ideas will make things go incredibly fast, but I’m not sure that’s true, at least not to the degree required for some of the predictions.<\/p>\n

(And that’s even leaving aside the problems of unintended consequences and straight-up physical constraints. Absent big loopholes in some of the laws of physics, it’s going to be hard to generate some of the things the Singularity is supposed to provide.)<\/p>\n

But in a way, this is all beside the point– again, the question wasn’t “Will the world be different in 2106?”, it was “Will the ‘human’ race be around?” And as I said above, I think the vast bulk of humanity will be more or less the same a hundred years from now that it is now– there are just too many of us, and we age too slowly for the species as a whole to become unrecognizable in a hundred years.<\/p>\n

I shouldn’t really plug this before I finish the book (I’m less than a hundred pages in, and keep getting sidetracked by other things), but I think that there’s probably more real insight in a book like Geoff Ryman’s Air<\/cite>, which deals with the impact of new technology on poor people in Asia than there is in Charlie Stross’s Accelerando<\/cite>, which is largely about the wonders of the Singularity. It’s too easy to forget that the vast majority of people don’t have phones, period, let alone wireless access to the Internet, and that whatever explosion of miracles and wonders we’re seeing here in the First World has not had the same impact on Africa or Asia that it has here. It’ll take some really remarkable economic shifts to move things around enough for the species as a whole to be changed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The problem with scheduling something like last week’s Ask a ScienceBlogger for a time when I’m out of town is that any interesting discussions that turn up in comments are sort of artificially shortened because I can’t hold up my end of the conversation from a remote site. I do want to respond (below the… Continue reading Unfinished Business<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-258","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-science","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=258"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/258\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=258"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=258"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=258"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}