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the singularity on econtalk
The subject matter for this episode holds my interest, but the discussion ended with a stark and bleak dystopian vision that I originally had no interest in writing about (which writing here shows I changed my mind about that). A couple interesting historical points - the current doubling rate for the economy is about 15 years, which makes it interesting to consider 8 times greater wealth in just the span of my life, a point that seems easy to understand just in terms of how much better cars are now, how much easier it is to find good ethnic food just about anywhere, improved health care technology, and so on.
Past "singularities". With the industrial revolution, about 200 years ago, the doubling rate increased to 15 from closer to every thousand years. The advent of agriculture, about 10,000 years ago, allowed people to stay put and save and develop tools and slightly more roundabout production techniques, shortening the doubling time from ~250,000 years. Of course those past events are roughly measured, but provide historical examples of such relatively rapid transitions, which by extrapolation might suggest the next singularity to lead to a doubling every 2 weeks.
- Before 10,000 years ago - doubling rate ~250,000 years, then people develop farming
- 10,000 to 200 years ago - doubling rate ~1,000 years, then people develop the industrial revolution
- Most recent 200 years - doubling rate ~15 years, then the guest predicts people will develop advanced AI
- Future prospects - doubling rate ~ 2 weeks
The guest promotes a vision of this next singularity driven by rapid population growth represented by the eventual ability of people to replicate their brains in silicon, which is where the discussion starts to break down. I'm not qualified to judge the feasibility of the technology projection; on certain levels the modeling analogy works fine, but the neurological connectivities requiring such functional replication occur at exceedingly fine spatial scales, and mapping the current state sufficiently to replicate a person represent similar temporal refinement, that by the time we reach the ability to replicate those functions there may likely be other successful approaches to broadly capable AI. The discussion also fails to adequately explore the conditions that would drive us to treat these creations as human in the sense of having certain rights and requirements for life. Then were the questions about the economic implications of such creatures, which barely scratched the subjects of their innovation and specialization and creation of new and better ways of satisfying human needs. In short, the episode was unsatisfying, but worth further discussion.
Hanson on the Technological Singularity (1/3/2011) - Robin Hanson of GMU talks about the idea of a technological singularity--a sudden, large increase in the rate of growth due to technological change. Hanson argues that it is plausible that a change in technology could lead to world output doubling every two weeks rather than every 15 years, as it does currently. Hanson suggests a likely route to such a change is to port the human brain into a computer-based emulation. Such a breakthrough in artificial intelligence would lead to an extraordinary increase in productivity creating enormous wealth and radically changing the returns to capital and labor. The conversation looks at the feasibility of the process and the intuition behind the conclusions. Hanson argues for the virtues of such a world.