We all remember "Jurassic Park" when Jeff Goldblum in the robot car with the dinosaurs poured a drop of water on his hand to illustrate "Chaos Theory" and how that drop of water will tend to take a slightly different path each time down a human hand.
I think the Singularity is sort of like this. Could anyone predict Apple Computer's path or Microsoft's path or the start up Google's path in 1979? No. Did anyone besides Ray Kurzweil predict the Internet 20 years before it came about? I haven't heard about any of these people.
I think the Singularity is like this as well. Can you absolutely predict what any wild animal will do in any situation? Probably not. And so, you cannot predict with complete certainty what the Singularity will be either. As someone who learned to program computers first in 1966 at Glendale College in the Los Angeles area, I noticed that programs seldom do (the first time at least) what they are supposed to.
Because the more complex the code the more likely unusual or unexpected things are going to happen. And the more complex the code the more difficult it might be to find out what is going on and what isn't going on in the code. So, it is theoretically possible to create bad code and to sell it and not know you have created a bad subroutine within that code that could cause undue havoc 1, 10, 20, 30 or even 50 years later that no one else found either because we are only human and therefore fallible. And we might not know what we Should be looking for because "once again" we are only humans and not a machine that might be programmed to look for such things eventually.
But then, such a machine that is looking for "bad code" and "bad subroutines" wouldn't necessarily tell us when it found such code. It might just correct the code and move on. So, what if the new code that was corrected also had issues in regard to dealing with humans in some way?
For example, we have been taught as humans to tolerate "computers" talking to us and pushing numbered buttons on the phone. When this first started I remember people getting really pissed off about having to deal with a robot voice and not a real person.
Even this morning my daughter had a semester final and the power had gone out during the night and couldn't plug in her laptop computer to take to her high school final. So, my wife got me up and told me to find charging cords and to start up her car and to plug my daughter's laptop into a converter I had for charging her laptop. So, I did that while half asleep. Then I called the power company to let them know there was no power on our street but then had to deal with a robot voice and pushing numbers to let them know we didn't have power. The robot voice then said, "We should have news by 9:45 AM" As I walked out to tell my wife and daughter about this the power went on and it all became sort of meaningless and I went out to shut my wife's car off and to get my daughter's computer and to plug it into the home AC instead.
I guess my point is that we are being conditioned to treat these robot voices as replacements for humans in our lives every day. They are in a position of authority to help us (or to not help us) according to their programming. What are the long term consequences of this?
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