On Mon, Feb 24, 2020 at 7:32 AM TimTyler <[email protected]> wrote: > On 2020-02-23 20:02:PM, Matt Mahoney wrote: > ... > > Nobody at Microsoft believes in singularities. > > > > To be honest, I don't either. > > The singularity is nonsense, but the concept isn't required. Machine > superintelligence is likely to result in fast progress in some areas, power > imbalances and big changes. IOW, it is an important development, and no > doubt most of the participants basically understand this.
"The singularity" is a joke Heinz von Foerster played on Science magazine <https://www.researchgate.net/publication/9785147_Doomsday_Friday_13_November_AD_2026_At_this_date_human_population_will_approach_infinity_if_it_grows_as_it_has_grown_in_the_last_two_millenia>. He basically formalized informal discussion of the concept in the cybernetics community that may have originated von Neumann <https://www.ams.org/journals/bull/1958-64-03/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5/S0002-9904-1958-10189-5.pdf>. But any joke has to have an element of truth to it, as reflected in this passage: Coalitions However, what may be true for elements which, because of lack of adequate communication among each other, have to resort to a competitive, (almost) zero-sum multiperson game may be false for elements that possess a system of communication which enables them to form coalitions until all elements are so strongly linked that the population as a whole can be considered from a game-theoretical point of view as a single person playing a two-person game with nature as its opponent. It's rather interesting that I was already writing a "multiperson game" to include non-terrestrial resources in the world model's differential equations <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spasim> when I enrolled in a "Second Order Cybernetics <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second-order_cybernetics>" class of Heinz's at his "Biological Computer Laboratory". Things were really pretty free-wheeling under Heinz... too free-wheeling as I ended up spending all my time writing my game rather than studying under him, and basically submitting my game to him a substitute for having been educated by him. I don't recall the resulting grade. When I brought up Heinz to Hamming over lunch at the Naval Postgraduate School, he virtually exploded: "von Foerster! Now *there*'s a first class *KOOK*!" That reaction is certainly understandable given what was going on at the BCL before its demise, but I think a reaction more to appearance (ie: taking "the singularity" seriously) than to substance. Then you get scifi authors riffing on the joke and BINGO, we are stuck with a nonsense term forever. ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Tab97f0f82cc3442a-M1cddee8611275a0d4acf381f Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
