Singularity Slugfest – The web’s ablaze over if it will or won’t happen
If you haven’t heard, or if you live under an old typewriter with these funny little arms, there’s a fight out there among them blogger folk over whether or not there will or won’t be a Singularity event. Alex Knapp, Charlie Stross and Michael Anissimov, to name a few of the big names, are having a nice little fight over just what it means for a computer to be a true AI.
Lets get some framework going here, and then I, yes I, will show you how all three are wrong and what the meaning of the Singularity event really is. First, the singularity event is something that will/might/won’t happen in the future where computers become just as smart as people. That is the event. Once that happens we can call up our trusty dusty computer and ask it a question and it may or may not answer, since it’s just as smart as us it may just choose not to.
Of course, that’s the problem that Mr. Stross has. The computer, you see, will never be as smart as us because we have millions of years of evolution. Our intelligence has been crafted by generations of suffering and misery and goddamnit, no machine will ever be able to be us!
Mr. Knapp says, slow down there Mr. Stross, we’re not saying that computers will be human intelligence they will just be as intelligent as us. So when we ask them, why the fuck my computer has blue screened, they will tell us, because window’s sucks.
Mr. Anissimov, whose name is just far to similar to Asimov, says…well I really don’t know what the hell he says. Honestly, the debate is really a philosophical one and not one that is helpful or hurtful to the emerging singularity event, that will of course happen.
How do I know it will happen? Because, the singularity event really has nothing to do with whether or not you can ask your toaster to not burn the toast. Wanna know what it is? The really big secret?
Ok, it’s not really a secret. All the singularity event really is is a time when computers become so powerful we can ask them, just what do I need to do to live forever? A computer will become so powerful that it will be able to totally simulate the human body. When that’s done we’ll be able to rapidly test drugs, in hours and not years. We’ll be able to model replacement organs. We’ll be able to do experiments on the human body that we can not do today.
Computers and the medical industry will fully merge and replacement organs, parts, etc will allow us to extend our lives and live indefinitely. We’ll be able to replace eyes, ears, augment our immune systems and perhaps even record our brains so that if our bodies do suffer major trauma, we can have a new body grown and plugged right back into it.
Ray Kurzweil knows full well that’s what the singularity event is. He doesn’t give a good god damn whether or not he can have a conversation with the computer, he only cares if the computer will save his life and extend it, not to mention make him young again and bring his father back from the dead (yes he really wants that).
So the next time you see a couple of bloggers debating the fate of future AI, just remember, we don’t give a shit. All we want is our bodies to be 25 and stay that way for 1,000 years. If they do turn out to be intelligent, and threaten us in any way, we’ll just unplug the fuckers.
