Vernor Vinge: Signs of the Singularity

http://spectrum.ieee.org/jun08/6306

by erik • 18 years ago

14 19 18 years ago

spectrum.ieee.org

zach• 18 years ago

My shorthand for the singularity is that it's whenever AI becomes as relevant as we thought it was going to be. It is really a brilliant rhetorical device to discuss technology.

Similarly though, you could say that pneumatic tubes are still going to be a major technology, but first we have to reach the "tubularity." When is football going to be as massively popular in the US as the rest of the world? Well, after we reach The Soccularity. Now that you presume it's a future event, you can bracket the conversation around that.

Note that I'm not doubting the real singularity's existence, just marveling at this act of rhetorical jujitsu.

eyudkowsky• 18 years ago

Whose act of rhetorical jujitsu? Ever seen anyone define the Singularity this exact way besides you?

gruseom3• 18 years ago

The definition in his first paragraph is unrelated to the criticism in the second, which is that using the phrase "The Singularity" already frames things in favor of the idea that it is a real future event.

Personally, the concept has always struck me as the childish fantasy of a certain personality type. But I think it's worth pointing out that in another current article on HN (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=205869), Freeman Dyson has some interesting things to say about it:

Q: Does any of that [concept of "The Singularity"] resonate with you?

Dyson: Not at all. The technical tricks these people are talking about are only a small part of the human experience. They vastly overestimate their own importance. I look at the world in a very different way. It's partly a matter of being old, but I look at the subway networks in cities, for instance. They also have the N-squared law. If you have a subway network with N routes, its value to the passenger is N squared. That's fine. But once you get to a certain number of routes, like 20 or so, there's very rapid growth, followed by saturation. This will also happen with chips. To some extent, it already has. It's true that the price per megaflop is going down according to Moore's Law, but what you can do with the processing power isn't increasing at the same rate. I remember doing a study on the cost of nuclear power in the 1950s, when people thought it would be very cheap. We studied what the economic effect would be if the cost of electricity were zero. The answer is, "Not much." It costs far more to use electricity than it does to make it. There's about a 5 percent drop in the GNP if electricity is free. So cheap energy is all it takes. The same is true of computing power.

Vernor Vinge: Signs of the Singularity

Related Stories