If you like your blog posts short, sharp and about today, you might want to skip this one. I’ll be looking at one scenario for mobile phones, that results in the inevitable conclusion that they’ll be as obsolete as woolly mammoth hunting, probably within 20 years.
I’ve been thinking on and off about The Singularity for quite a while now. Really since it was a weird branch of scifi to the present day where reputable scientists are starting to talk about it as inevitable. As an example, G’day World’s Cameron Reilly recently Podcasted Dr Benjamin Goertzel of Novamente LLC, an expert in Artificial General Intelligence. Ben was talking about The Singularity in terms of man’s last hope of survival and that it was going to happen in the next 20 to 30 years - or within your lifetime for most of you, if you’re lucky.
If you know what The Singularity is, you can skip this. If you don’t, keep an open mind and remember that people a lot brighter than you probably are, really believe this. The basic idea is that at some point, computing intelligence will reach such sophistication that it takes over our world. This could be a benevolent take-over, with our blessing and connivance, which could take us to new heights as a race - a race of Gods or superbeings, if you will, where anything and everything is possible.
Or it could end up with the awful reality of Skynet envisaged in the Terminator. Or maybe a more life-like version of Second Life, which is why many people are so interested in it - it’s not what it is, but what it could become.
I probably haven’t done a great job of explaining an incredibly complicated concept in just two paragraphs and it has huge implications for us as a race, whichever scenario holds true in the end. But one thing is for sure, you won’t need a mobile phone anymore - certainly in any of the more utopian visions, things like telepathy and teleportisation suddenly become real because you’ve gone digital.
In Ben’s interview with Cam, he said tellingly that he’s given up trying to talk to ordinary people about this, as it was just too hard to get them to understand what is actually happening. It was hard enough to convince highly educated scientists working in this field to look up and see where their work was headed.
But if I were you - apart from selling your mobile phone stock:-) I’d start educating yourself about this subject, because if Ben and his ilk is right it’s going to affect us all, more profoundly than when we came down from the trees.
OK and you can forget the comments about what I’ve been smoking tonight.
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Crazy timing with your thinking, Russell, and the re-release of Alan Parsons Project’s album, I Robot, which is based on the robot stories of Isaac Asimov (it’s in this month’s issue of Wired Magazine).
From the album:
“I ROBOT… THE STORY OF THE RISE OF THE MACHINE AND THE DECLINE OF MAN, WHICH PARADOXICALLY COINCIDED WITH HIS DISCOVERY OF THE WHEEL… AND A WARNING THAT HIS BRIEF DOMINANCE OF THIS PLANET WILL PROBABLY END, BECAUSE HE TRIED TO CREATE ROBOT IN HIS OWN IMAGE.”
Well, hopefully when the time arrives we’ll find a survival use for our incredibly muscular thumbs.
in some ways it isn’t hard to understand why people can’t get their head around the Singularity. All you have to do is to play with Vista for a few weeks. Makes it hard to believe we are anywhere NEAR being close to machines becoming intelligent.
Any good books / articles you would recommend?
Tommi
There’s loads of links at The Singularity Institute http://www.singinst.org/reading and at Ray Kutzweil’s http://www.kurzweilai.net/index.html?flash=2, one of the leading thinkers and promotors of this idea. Also try his book The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology.
For fiction, Neal Stephenson’s classic Snow Crash is still very good and The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect is very good available here as a free download http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/. Warning: heavy sexual and S&M content though.
You can also find an interview that Cam did with the author of Metamorphosis on the TPN website.
That should get you going, but please chip in with other recommendations, people.
Russell
[...] Mobiles Are Doomed. Tiene cierta gracia: algún día llegará la singularidad y no serán necesarios. Una idea puramente de ciencia ficción que no hay que tomarse en serio. [...]