George Rebane
The recent burst of large language models (LLMs) from AI research has reinvigorated the Singularity related topics of machine sentience, sapience, super-intelligence, agency, ethics, morals, …, along with prognoses of what they may have in store for humans when/if they become ascendant. Most commentators, including yours truly, see a high likelihood of a dystopian post-Singularity future for mankind.
Among these well-known AI experts are internationally renowned scientists like Nick Bostrom (e.g. Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies, 2014) and Max Tegmark (e.g. Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017). These tomes are worth reading more than once, which I am currently doing. It turns that both Bostrom (Oxford) and Tegmark (MIT) are established physicists, philosophers, and AI researchers (and both were born in Sweden).
Their counsel for humanity to proceed carefully into a future not dominated by our species is countered by more hopeful futurists like Hans Moravec (e.g. Mind Children: The Future of Robot and Human Intelligence, 1990) and Ray Kurzweil (e.g. The Singularity is Near, 2005).
About the Singularity, Moravec (Carnegie-Mellon) advises his readers that “human equivalence is just the beginning, not an upper bound. Once the tireless thinking capacity of robots is directed to the problem of their own improvement and reproduction, even the sky will not limit their voracious exploration of the universe. … Moravec challenges us to imagine with him the possibilities and pitfalls of such a scenario. Rather than warning us of takeover by robots, the author invites us, as we approach the end of this millennium, to speculate about a plausible, wonderful postbiological future and the ways in which our minds might participate in its unfolding.”
And it is our postbiological future that I would like to expand on here. Moravec, Kurzweil, and others of their ilk have been describing a post-Singularity world that is inhabited by both intelligent machines and various forms of ‘transhumans’ – humans who have shed their evolved mortal coils and taken up new forms in both the physical and computational sense. A popular scenario has some of us living in cyborg bodies. Another inviting future has us living in virtual worlds as computational entities, and still others have us co-habiting the material (real?) world with superintelligent machines exercising some manner of peer relationships.
Sandbox – 20apr23
[In updating the government’s butt stupid department, we witnessed today a major speech by SecTreas Janet Yellen assuring the Red Chinese that that US has no intention in surpassing them in international trade and economic progress, let alone outcompeting them in military matters. Then for what in hell are these people getting paid?? gjr]
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