On Tue, Mar 9, 2021, 4:12 PM WriterOfMinds <[email protected]> wrote:
> Then perhaps defining your terms, and maintaining awareness of how other > people define them, would be helpful? I'm pretty sure we've had the > discussion about the popular/futurist definition of "singularity" being > different from the mathematical definition before, and you persist in > acting as if other people must be using the mathematical definition. > It seem that Good and Vinge do use "singularity" in the mathematical sense, although that actually prevents us from predicting one, as Vinge calls it an "event horizon on the future". Good doesn't say what happens after the "intelligence explosion". Kutzweil projects a faster than exponential growth in computing power until the 2040's when computers surpass brains, but makes no prediction afterwards as to whether it will slow down or grow forever or grow hyperbolically to a point. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity If it does slow down, as I argue it eventually must in a finite universe, what should we call it? How about the inflection point in Moore's Law. We might have already reached it. Clock speeds stalled in 2010. Transistors can't be smaller than the spacing between dopant atoms, a few nm, and we are close to that now. We could reduce power consumption by a factor of a billion using nanotechnology, but can we develop it fast enough to keep doubling global computing power every 1.5 years? Global energy production is 15 TW, or 2 KW per person. Human metabolism is 5% of that. The biosphere converts sunlight to food using 500 TW out of 90,000 TW available the Earth's surface or 160,000 TW in the stratosphere or low Earth orbit, or 384 trillion TW if we build a Dyson sphere. That would give us 10^48 irreversible bit operations per second at the Landauer limit at the CMB temperature of 3K, enough to simulate 3 billion years of evolution on 10^37 bits of DNA in a few minutes on a Dyson sphere with radius 10,000 AU. A naive projection of Moore's Law says that will happen around 2160, after nanotechnology displaces DNA based life in the 2080's. Actually building the sphere is possible because the sun produces enough energy to lift all of Earth's mass into space in about a week. After that our options are interstellar travel or speeding up the Sun's output using a black hole. Ultimately we are confronted with a finite 10^53 Kg universe that can only support 10^120 quantum operations and 10^90 bit writes. At what point do we call it a singularity? ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/Ta5ed5d0d0e4de96d-M79cf5b7f853361f839fceba2 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
