arjun › Comments

Haha nice. It seems pretty inevitable, which is both exciting and scary :/ - Dion Almaer

There's a lot of misinformation about what "singulatarians" actually believe. Not everyone agrees with Ray Kurzweil's notions that he'll live long enough to upload his consciousness. The best resource I've found is Michael Annissmov's Accelerating Future blog: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael... - Dan Kaplan

I'm all for it, only I say let Kurzweil go first when comes to the first downloading of brain contents. That way if something is missing, we'll know pretty quick ;-) - Dean Terry

Interesting, we were just talking about this last night: http://friendfeed.com/e... Doing a quick search, looks like singularity is on the brain of Friendfeed lately. Ooooooeeeeeoooo. - Mark Trapp

i think its at least a few years off, so you can relax, plenty of time for you to get used to it before it happens :P - bob

It's just amazing that I haven't seen any of the movies where this happens (Terminator, iRobot, etc.). What else are people working on from within the FriendFeed headquarters that can kill me? :) - Ana

I'm not convinced. still disconcerting as hell though. - Marco(aureliusmaximus)

ana, i think someone is working on doomsday devices over in the furniture graveyard :P - bob

Here's the essay that introduced the singularity concept - http://mindstalk.net/vinge.... Fantastic read. - Michael Nielsen

I took Computer Ethics at SDSU (where Vinge taught) and one of our assignments was to compare Vinge's singularity essay to Ted Kaczynski's "Unabomber Manifesto." The similarities are rather striking. I'm not saying it's good or bad, but it is extremely fascinating the differing approach people take to similar topics. - Brooks Bishop

to counterbalance computers that are super smart, we need humans who are freakishly strong. - eviltom

I always thought the first sign of the singularity was twitter. sigh - Elad

@Brooks Bishop see also Bill Joy's wired essay: http://www.wired.com/wired... - Nick Lothian

Thanks for posting that link to Vinge's essay, Michael. You're right - a mind-boggling read on a fascinating subject that hadn't really crossed my radar until reading this terrific thread. Makes me appreciate FF all the more for putting it in front of me. Could its increasing popularity be another of the early signs indicating the onset of the Singularity? I think we should be told. - Bob Kingsley

movies are pretty bad at showing the future; they tend to show things that *look* cool - Amit Patel

@nick: Thanks for that wired link. Thanks to all for discussing this topic - very interesting. - nadim

Since there seems to be interest, most of the best reading on this is SciFi. Vinge's "Rainbow End" and Stross's "Accelerando" are probably the best "What happens when (if) the Singularity happens" books. (Interesting to note that Vinge is an ex CompSci professor and Stross is an ex-perl hacker). If you want to get scared by the singularity read "A Fire Upon the Deep", though. - Nick Lothian

@Nick: thanks for the link to the Bill Joy essay. Another fascinating, absorbing read. - Bob Kingsley

Ana, you should keep your eyes out for human sized bugs, among other things. - Clare Dibble

I'm a singularity skeptic - increasing compute power doesn't solve basic problems like global warming. - Piaw Na

Will the Singularity happen? Never say never, although I am a skeptic. I do think most Singularitarians completely underestimate the complexity of human biology and by orders of magnitude - Deepak Singh

That's actually a pretty common response. Interesting side: I knew my wife was a keeper when she instantly took to the idea, not frightened or put off at all. - Mark "Rizzn" Hopkins

@Deepak agreed, and there's also the matter of assuming that they've figured out and are right about basic metaphysical issues argued for centuries. As we've learned in recent years, certainty can be dangerous. Like I said above: Kurzweil goes first! - Dean Terry

I've said this before, I really like and agree with Kurzwiel but I have issues with the diet of 100s of pills a day (to make it to the singularity) and the very odd alter ego his future self becomes. I'm also troubled by the poor graphics on his site :) They really need some of that exponential love. - Doug Brooks

Kurtzweils accelerated returns theory is probably true and implies an upcoming singularity event. But the singularity is crucially dependent on the computing-biology interface and I agree with @Deepak and @Dean terry that biology is the limiting factor and that biomedicine is not in the steep part of the S-curve, - yet.......The singularity must come at some point however, and unlike @Amit Patel, I believe it will look extremely cool.... - Nils Reinton

This item quoting Kurzweil turned up on BBC News in February 2008: http://snipurl.com/2vfva - "Machines to match man by 2029". - Bob Kingsley

@Deepak etc I'm also a skeptic. There was a good podcast from ITConversations about some of the barriers to the singularity - I can't remember who it was by or even what conference it was from, though. - Nick Lothian

I'm not sure about an ITConversations podcast, but there's a 2004 Long Now talk from Bruce Sterling where he explains why he's skeptical: http://www.longnow.org/project... - Jen Dodd

@Piaw, it does if the Singularity decimates or destroys humans and our demand for housing, transportation, food, and other global warming activity. - John Lam