Thursday, December 6, 2012

facingthesingularity.com

Contents

Sometime this century, machines will surpass human levels of intelligence and ability. This event — the “Singularity” — will be the most important event in our history, and navigating it wisely will be the most important thing we can ever do.
Luminaries from Alan Turing and Jack Good to Bill Joy and Stephen Hawking have warned us about this, and it doesn’t depend on the occurrence of Ray Kurzweil’s particular vision of an “accelerating change” Singularity. Why do I think Hawking and company are right, and what can we do about it?
Facing the Singularity is my attempt to answer these questions.
  1. My Own Story
  2. From Skepticism to Technical Rationality
  3. Why Spock is Not Rational
  4. The Laws of Thought
  5. The Crazy Robot’s Rebellion
  6. Not Built to Think About AI
  7. Playing Taboo with “Intelligence”
  8. Superstition in Retreat
  9. Plenty of Room Above Us
  10. Don’t Flinch Away
  11. No God to Save Us
  12. Value is Complex and Fragile
  13. Intelligence Explosion
  14. The AI Problem, with Solutions
  15. Engineering Utopia
end quote from:

Facing The Singularity

I was searching for something at Youtube and ran across this blog site. I thought it was interesting that someone was involved in thinking about "The Singularity" enough to start a whole blog site about it with translations available for several worldwide languages. The basic concept at this site that I found was how machines will surpass human intelligence this century. Whether that is 10 years from now or 3 years from now  or 30 or 50 it will happen. There is likely nothing that will (or can) stop it unless a solar flare hit or an ice age hit and drove us all back to the stone age en masse.

Otherwise, it is something that we or our children or grandchildren are going to have to deal with. 

The problem that I personally see in regard to this particular change of "machines becoming more intelligent than humans" is I think that phrase isn't useful in understanding what this means.

Maybe saying "every physical movement vehicle and learning vehicle and storer of information is expanding and changing the way humans see and experience everything" might be a more useful way to put this. 

I think for humans to "Stay in control" of our own destiny we must make friends with technology if it is going to be around us. IF it is not helping us to better lives then it is killing us and diminishing us. So, deciding what any technology is doing every moment after the singularity will decide whether we become masters of our destiny as humans or only victims of those who control the machines. And in a singularity even those who controlled the machines would be victims too eventually. So, if the machines are not our personal friends then we would have to fight them and destroy them once again(like on many planets and civilizations before this) until some kind of useful harmony between humans and machines existed so both were happy in some kind of meaningful way. 

Also, this particular blog(facingthesingularity.com) is written by an atheist. But, as long as you can maintain your own point of view (whatever it is) reading what he has to say might be useful to you. Because, Maybe an atheists point of view might be more useful than a spiritual or religious one to begin to delve into the problems of machines more intelligent than humans.

However, my personal experience of the universe is that literally everything is alive. There is nothing that is not alive. This is my experience as an intuitive. Since everything is alive and I experience it this way you could call me an animist, which is the most ancient form of human worship in some ways. However, if everything is alive and nothing is dead then anything we build is our friend or potential friend or even relative. IN a world of Iphone, Ipod, Ipad, and IMac, they are all potential friends from an animists point of view. So, that is where I start. To view all machines as cold and heartless and even dead is to be completely alone with everything including you, dead. 

When I was young I thought about what it would actually mean to live in a world as an atheist. I decided that I personally would rather die than be an atheist so terrifying and unrewarding and lonely was that world. 

If you are not an atheist spend a few days thinking that there is nothing beyond you physically that is alive and meaningful. Do you want to live in that world? So, the 10% of me in my late teens that didn't believe yet in God and Spirit and Jesus and Angels I decided not to worry about so that I could stay alive and not commit suicide or self destruct in other ways.

I suppose some people never have such a meaningful conversation with themselves, but death was always very near to me from age 2 with whooping cough. So, I'm pretty good at facing death after whooping cough, blunt trauma childhood epilepsy, Heart virus, and now having to go on heart meds once again because of flying during a Solar Flare hitting earth 14 years after my heart virus.

 

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