Toonbots message board: by the way...

Michael Mon Feb 14 21:54:01 2005 Re: by the way... > what is "the Singularity"? is this something i should be doing > something about? laying in tinfoil hats, or the like? Google it, mouse. The Eschaton, baby. The point where the speed of technical progress becomes infinite. The transcendence of the human race. We're likely to live that long, you know.

Jenn Tue Feb 15 09:29:50 2005 Re: by the way... > Google it, mouse. The Eschaton, baby. Whenever anyone says 'google it', I always lay in tinfoil hats. Good thinking, mouse!

Michael Tue Feb 15 10:25:02 2005 Re: by the way... > Whenever anyone says 'google it', I always lay in tinfoil hats. Good > thinking, mouse! Hee, hee.

mouse Sat Feb 19 00:40:24 2005 Re: by the way... > We're likely to live that long, you know. is that a promise or a threat?

spinclad Sun Feb 20 01:00:19 2005 Re: by the way... > > We're likely to live that long, you know. > is that a promise or a threat? we should live so long... so i got started on a nice long ramble (now thrice aborted by a bug in mozilla attached to the key ctrl-e, which i've somehow got wired into my fingers, alas) on the mere exponentiality of Moore's Law (things can double in speed and density every so often forever without getting any closer to a wall) but how delegating the research to our assemblers could change things (Zeno's Law: things work a while building the next generation that can do the same thing twice as fast) until things fairly soon reach a yawning gap below atomic scale that could spoil things for quite a while... still, even a finite change of this magnitude should make things Completely Different for us on our couches in our new enforced leisure... wondering for whose good our successors might be working _this_ hour... i think i'd call it both.

Michael Sun Feb 20 16:34:05 2005 Re: by the way... > i think i'd call it both. Oh most definitely both, yes. The way I see it, currently you can be a couple of decades behind the curve without feeling ill effects, unless you work in a technical field, in which case you'd better be within a few years of up to date. Some projections of the Singularity are as early as 2012 (well, *December* of 2012) and more believable ones are in the 2040's. Either way, we're going to see a few dozen revolutions on the order of the discovery of agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, the printing press, and the Internet. Probable ones are nanotech, true artificial intelligence with better-than-human capabilities, direct brain interfaces, effective immortality (in body or in mind or both, but of course since the Singularity is coming, it's anyone's guess what immortality will bring you), and the ability to rebuild your body cell by cell to suit your momentary whim. And this is in the next couple of decades. After that, it gets weird and really starts accelerating. Towards the end, you'll want to stay within a few days of up to date, or you'll be hopelessly obsolete -- basic new technologies will be invented weekly. Then daily. Then hourly. Fortunately, you'll have better support for keeping up to date; reading, for instance, will be ridiculously antiquated. You'll download your knowledge directly. But of course when you download knowledge, you run serious, serious security risks. Especially since artificially intelligent viruses will be a commonplace. The average virus will doubtlessly be smarter than any human alive today. And those will be the throwaway programs. The *real* software will be gods. The concept of individuality is likely to go obsolete. Death will cease to exist -- even if your body dies, it will be trivial to duplicate it to molecular accuracy (i.e. restore from backup). Merging duplicates will also be possible, so that people will make a quick duplicate for daily tasks, then merge after they're done. But other than that, life will go on. And the Amish will still be there anyway, so even though the notion of "species" will be rather obsolete, there will always be H.sapiens around.