Life is created in a lab for the first time

[Homesafe]

What does technological singularity mean?

well........you have to know what a paradigm shift is first. A Paradigm shift is where someone makes a fundamental discovery that comp0letely chages the way scientific theory thinks, like the discovery that the earth goes round the sun, or the invention of high pressure steam engines.

A few years ago, some guy platted the dates of hundreds of paradigm shifts in dozens of scientific fields, and you can see thatthe average time between paradigm shifts is getting shorter or and shorter, or, look at it another way, the speed at which we are inventing new things and discovering new science is getting faster and faster. The rate of discovery is increasing on a logarithmic rate. The theory goes that there will be a point where new science is being discovered so fast all of a sudden ALL scientific knowledge will suddenly become available to mankind, and it will occur at the same time as true Artificial Intelligence is invented. This point, where all of a sudden we know everything, and all knowledge and technology is mastered or master-able, is called the Technological Singularity.

The arrival of AI and the technological singularity will herald a new phase in human development, where man and AI combine to form superior, immortal man-machine cybernetic intelligence.

The scary bit is that the calculated date if this occurring is somewhere between 2045 and 2075.................

You might be the mother of all paradigm 5h!t

 

[Lincsbodger]

That graph tells us that the time between 'events' has been reducing by a factor of ten every ten years. If we extrapolate it up to the present, it predicts that a major technological change will happen every year. Now extrapolation is a dodgy business but extrapolating up to the present can at least be tested.

Are we seeing a major change every year? That rather depends on your definition of a major change. One of the things I was taught back in the eighties was that changes were happening at roughly 55 year intervals. Examples given were steam engines, electricity and internal combustion. (I might have missed one out somewhere.) The next one was predicted to arrive soon and, sure enough, we got the internet. Maybe K-Star will be next.

So let's take the graph at face value and see what it predicts. In ten year's time, changes will be happening ten times a year. In twenty year's time they will happen 100 times a year. That's not a singularity; it's an asymptote. There is no point in the future when everything happens at once. We're safe!

no, your misreading it, the graph shows the distance in time between paradigm shifts in several major fields is tending to zero. That doesnt mean everything happens at once, it means at some point we discover everything else left to discover in a finitely short, rapidly diminishing period of time, tending to zero. Once AI is invented the effect will be faster, because true AI will be infinitely superior to human intellect, and will be able to push science further than we can imagine. It will also mark the next phase in human evolution, the immortal cybernetic enhanced human.

And if you dont think immortality is within our grasp, according to the medical scientists the first human to live longer than 500 years has already been born, ie there is a small child alive somewhere today who will not die until the 25th or 26th century.

Dont argue the point with me, if you disagree go argue it with the list of eminent scientists previously supplied!!!!

 

[skitzee2k]

Scientist Craig Venter creates life for first time in laboratory sparking debate about 'playing god'

That's a bit of an overstatement isn't it! When you read the details you find that he started with an existing bacterium and swapped out its DNA. That's not creating life; it's just genetic modification on a grand scale. The new DNA wasn't built from scratch either but assembled from bits that can be obtained by mail order.

What we have here isn't man-made life. It's existing life chopped up and reassembled to produce a new bacterium. To really create life you would have to assemble the whole cell, starting with nothing more than chemical compounds that can themselves be synthesized from elements.

This may happen some day. There was a time when chemist thought that the compounds they labelled 'organic' could only be synthesized by living organisms. They were wrong.

Well not entirely. Let's be clear, nothing that the scientists used was alive....but they brought it to life.

Like Frankenstein was recycled bits brought to life.

 

[Space cat]

And if you dont think immortality is within our grasp, according to the medical scientists the first human to live longer than 500 years has already been born, ie there is a small child alive somewhere today who will not die until the 25th or 26th century.

I never said anything about that; maybe it was someone else. I was just making mathematical observations about the graph - and I'm now thinking that I might have read it wrong. (Unfortunately, it seems to have been removed. Does anybody know why? )

The vertical scale was logarithmic but I'm not sure now about the horizontal scale.

That graph tells us that the time between 'events' has been reducing by a factor of ten every ten years.

Or, to put it another way, the rate of invention goes up by a factor of ten every decade. That's exponential growth which is pretty much what you would expect. It would also require the horizontral scale to be a linear one and now I can't remeber whether it was. If it was logarithmic then the graph, if extrapolated into the future, does indeed predict a singularity.

 

[skitzee2k]

I don't know, sounds very much to me like an 'Achilles and the tortoise' senario.

 

[Lincsbodger]

Heres the graph again, both scales are logarithmic (do they even teach logs in schools anymore?

Hers a smaller version with an explanation of all the data points. You can click on any of the references titles on the side and it plots it individually, you can really see what they mean then, and why the singularity is inevitable.

http://www.singularity.com/charts/page19.html

This is one of the more interesting graphs from that site: (note the doubling rate - every 1.2 years the power doubles ..... holy crap :O )

 

[Space cat]

I did misread the graph. That is a logarithmic scale on the bottom. Continuing the line of best fit down to the bottom, about 15 years ago the time between events reduced to one year. Let's stick our necks out and extrapolate further --

The graph predicts that one year ago the time between events was about 8 months - and one tenth of a year ago it was 0.8 months. The definition of a paradigm shift is subjective - that is to say that we could narrow the goalposts - but that wouldn't alter the shape of the graph as long as we were consistent in our definitions (and that's the fly in the ointment). What's really interesting is that the horizontal scale effectively ends today. It is mathematically impossible to continue that graph into the future. If it's correct, the technological singularity is happening right now.

 

[Lincsbodger]

I did misread the graph. That is a logarithmic scale on the bottom. Continuing the line of best fit down to the bottom, about 15 years ago the time between events reduced to one year. Let's stick our necks out and extrapolate further --

The graph predicts that one year ago the time between events was about 8 months - and one tenth of a year ago it was 0.8 months. The definition of a paradigm shift is subjective - that is to say that we could narrow the goalposts - but that wouldn't alter the shape of the graph as long as we were consistent in our definitions (and that's the fly in the ointment). What's really interesting is that the horizontal scale effectively ends today. It is mathematically impossible to continue that graph into the future. If it's correct, the technological singularity is happening right now.

Exactly.

Next step, immortal cybernetic superhumans.

 

[sooey]

Exactly.

Next step, immortal cybernetic superhumans.

Are you sure your not David Icke?

 

[Lincsbodger]

I did misread the graph. That is a logarithmic scale on the bottom. Continuing the line of best fit down to the bottom, about 15 years ago the time between events reduced to one year. Let's stick our necks out and extrapolate further --

The graph predicts that one year ago the time between events was about 8 months - and one tenth of a year ago it was 0.8 months. The definition of a paradigm shift is subjective - that is to say that we could narrow the goalposts - but that wouldn't alter the shape of the graph as long as we were consistent in our definitions (and that's the fly in the ointment). What's really interesting is that the horizontal scale effectively ends today. It is mathematically impossible to continue that graph into the future. If it's correct, the technological singularity is happening right now.

Personally, i think its pretty scary.

World oil will run out at about the same time as climate change hits water supplies and food production, I think around 2035ish, and the singularity might be the only way we can avoid mountains of dead bodies on every continent.......whats the US gonna do when the Nevada Desert stretches all the way to Kansas?

 

[Space cat]

the singularity might be the only way we can avoid mountains of dead bodies on every continent

I'll settle for warp drive and the orgasmatron. Seriously though, oil must run out eventually so it's K-Star or bust.

PS: I already invented the telephone ignoring machine.

 

[Lincsbodger]

the singularity might be the only way we can avoid mountains of dead bodies on every continent

I'll settle for warp drive and the orgasmatron. Seriously though, oil must run out eventually so it's K-Star or bust.

PS: I already invented the telephone ignoring machine.

omg Barbarella and Jane Fonda, and lets not forget Duran Duran and the Matmos. Classic.

I've exchanged emails with Jane Fonda a couple of years back about the Vietnam War. You can follw her on Twitter these days......

 

[EddieM]

2013, ability to simulate the human brain, wow, I wonder who's brain? Disappointingly there's nothing on there to indicate when we'll get a computer that predict tomorrows weather.

 

[Lincsbodger]

2013, ability to simulate the human brain, wow, I wonder who's brain? Disappointingly there's nothing on there to indicate when we'll get a computer that predict tomorrows weather.

they have already built a simulation of a Cats Frontal Cortex, running at 1/87 speed.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/technology/ibm-brain-simulations-exceed-scale-of-cats-cortex

The simulation involves a billion spiking neurons and 10 trillion individual learning synapses, and was performed on an IBM Blue Gene/P supercomputer with 147,456 processors and 144TB of main memory.

"This is a tremendous historic milestone," says Dharmendra Modha, the lead researcher on IBM's cognitive computing project. "It shows that if we build a supercomputer with 1 exaflop computing power and 4 petabytes of main memory — which might be possible within the decade — then a human-scale simulation in real time will become possible."




Itll be a long time before we get accurate weather simulations, chaos theory and the butterfly effect will see to that.






wth is an exaflop, yet another new scale verb...........

 

[EddieM]

Hmm, I think there may be a major misconception here, i.e. Brains are not binary computers. Simply having a mega number cruncher is not the same as sentience. Doesn't matter how many cycles or processors you add.

There is a hell of a long way top go, and personally, I don't think we're even on the right track yet.

Edit:

Just read about tecnological singularity from good old wikipedia. I will sleep sound tonight, and for the rest of my life. Not an ice cubes.