6 reasons why Dvice.com doesn’t know anything about the Singularity
For those that follow the tech blogs of the world there is one that is run by SyFy channel called Dvice.com. All in all it’s a good site and I have it on my regular daily rotation of interesting sites to read. Recently, however, dvice put up a post about one of my favorite topics, The Singularity Event (so important that it gets initial letter caps), and they largely got things wrong.
The post was titled 6 reasons why you’ll never upload your mind into a computer. It basically states that technology will never develop to a point where computers will never crash, storage media will never die, energy needs for computers will never decrease, processing power will never grow and our minds will simply never work in a computer because our brains need a body.
Well, all those points are well and good, and probably wrong as we’ve seen technology does improve with time, but the real question I came up with after readying this inane article was, so what? And that leads me to my 6 reasons why Dvice doesn’t know what they are talking about.
1. So what? Lets say they are right, and you can’t upload a brain to a computer. Big deal? That really isn’t what the main theorists of the singularity are talking about. Basically in a few decades we’ll have really powerful computers that will do really cool things and will drastically change our lives, possibly allowing them to be extended. Not really all that far fetched since looking back in time, that’s what has happened in the past. Average life span has increased with technology, it’s not really so crazy to think it won’t continue to happen.
2. How exactly do you upload a brain to a computer in the first place? Doesn’t that not even make any sense? The general idea that i’ve read is that we’ll eventually be able to manufacture artificial brain cells and slowly make our brains into computers, not take our consciousness, which no one can really define, and move it somewhere. That really doesn’t make any sense anyway.
3. All those points about computers not having enough power, memory not lasing very long, etc, are really pointless. They don’t do all those things because no one has focused on making them do all those things. The first and foremost things today’s computers are meant to do is process data not house a human consciousness (still not sure what it is). Humans will never be able to live in a car if it goes under water. Well no shit, cars aren’t meant to go under water. But if there was some new crazy desire to make them to do that, you can rest assured we would.
4. The Singularity is really a bunch of different things that will happen in the coming decades. People, like the authors of the dvice post, love to point out about how we’ll not live forever. Sure, that is a big part of it all but not the only part. It’s about a revolution similar to the industrial revolution. What really could blow your mind is that the singularity like event has already happened with the birth of the internet. Right now we have access to data on any subject just by typing it into a computer. Unheard of level of information access. Doesn’t that count for something?
5. The dvice.com point 6 of “who gets uploaded” doesn’t really have anything to do with anything. Will rich people go first? Of course you idiots. Who is going first to space on space tourism trips? Rich people! Welcome to human history. The Rich and connected always get the first slice of the pie, nothing new there. Secondly, the dvice people mock the point of this happening “within our lifetimes” then go on to say that nothing is going to happen in the next few decades. Few decades? I plan on living a lot more than a few decades.
6. The dvice.com bozo’s stated that a website http://spectrum.ieee.org/static/singularity debunked all the singularity points but if you actually go there you find tons of articles that support it. Nice job morons.
I for one think that as technology increases so too will the comfort level of people. Also as it increases more problems can be solved. The big ticket item is that soon a computer will be so advanced that you can give it a problem and it will spit out a solution. It will be able to model the human body, test drugs in weeks instead of years and yes, even begin to extend human life. As for uploading to a computer, I don’t even know what the hell that means. Dvice doesn’t know either apparently.
