Post-humans are showing up all the time. I intend to evolve again on July 11, when I get equipped with my connection to the hive mind... er, I mean my always-on Wikipedia appliance, courtesy of Apple.
Admittedly, it won't be that impressive. If I could somehow take my iPhone back in time (with a trans-temporal wireless network connection, of course) to play Trivial Pursuit against my high-school-aged self, then it would be obvious how different my augmented self is from my prior self. (And equally obvious that skill at Trivial Pursuit, which used to be considered akin to being smart, is now an oddball exercise, like building furniture using nothing but a jackknife, or starting a fire without matches. We don't have to pursue trivia anymore. We caught it. It's sitting here in this box.)
But, as it happens, I'm actually late to the iPhone party, and when I get one nobody will care. It is as Bruce Sterling said: "the Singularity is banal". Post-singular creatures won't be all that impressed with themselves, just as the first human to utter a grammatical sentence didn't really stop to marvel at it. She was probably too busy trying to get her friend to pass her a handful of walnuts.
That's a good point, but I think the idea of "Singulitarians" (for lack of a better term) is that your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
Of course, if the "Singularity" happens to mean we'll just be much faster thinking version of ourselves, then perhaps you're right, it will be banal, as presumably our perception of time will be perverted as well.
your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?
In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.
Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.
If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.
I have heard it described as crossing the event horizon on a sufficiently large black hole. If the hole is large enough, its possible that the gravity at the horizon would only be 1G, so you wouldn't feel anything but you would see the sky close in on itself, never to return.
Comments
Post-humans are showing up all the time. I intend to evolve again on July 11, when I get equipped with my connection to the hive mind... er, I mean my always-on Wikipedia appliance, courtesy of Apple.
Admittedly, it won't be that impressive. If I could somehow take my iPhone back in time (with a trans-temporal wireless network connection, of course) to play Trivial Pursuit against my high-school-aged self, then it would be obvious how different my augmented self is from my prior self. (And equally obvious that skill at Trivial Pursuit, which used to be considered akin to being smart, is now an oddball exercise, like building furniture using nothing but a jackknife, or starting a fire without matches. We don't have to pursue trivia anymore. We caught it. It's sitting here in this box.)
But, as it happens, I'm actually late to the iPhone party, and when I get one nobody will care. It is as Bruce Sterling said: "the Singularity is banal". Post-singular creatures won't be all that impressed with themselves, just as the first human to utter a grammatical sentence didn't really stop to marvel at it. She was probably too busy trying to get her friend to pass her a handful of walnuts.
That's a good point, but I think the idea of "Singulitarians" (for lack of a better term) is that your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
Of course, if the "Singularity" happens to mean we'll just be much faster thinking version of ourselves, then perhaps you're right, it will be banal, as presumably our perception of time will be perverted as well.
your iPhone or other new gadget won't be invented in years, months or weeks, but hours or minutes. A human brain simply can't keep up.
What would be the point of that? A Magic iPhone Box, one that coughed out new designs so quickly that humans couldn't keep up, would be throttled back. What's the point of filling up warehouse after warehouse with beautiful new iPhones -- each unique and special -- that we don't even have time to try out? It's a waste of material resources. Why even bother building the Magic Box in the first place? Or should we build another Box that can appreciate the iPhones for us, faster than the eye can see? Who's going to pay the fuel bill for all that?
In manufacturing theory there's a concept of balancing the line: the slowest step in the manufacturing process serves as the bottleneck, and the secret to maximizing efficiency is to let that bottleneck control the speed of everything else. It doesn't pay to produce a million nuts and bolts per hour if you're only using ten thousand per hour: You just pile up expensive excess inventory -- and if the inventory rusts, or the designers eliminate nuts and bolts in the next version of your product, you lose all that inventory.
Similarly, the pace of technological change is ultimately constrained by human timescales. We're the technologists. We're the ones who control the knobs. We now have machines that can play master-level chess faster than the eye can follow, but we don't let them do that -- we don't let them run day and night, filling up our hard drives with recordings of dazzling strategic moves that we'll never have time to see. Instead, we turn the machines down to our speed, and use the leftover processing cycles for something else. Or turn them off and save some precious energy.
If you've lost the distinction between the Terminator films and real life, or have watched too many episodes of Pinky and the Brain, you might believe that a smart machine could somehow take control of the knobs from the humans. But, really, it's hard to sneak up on seven billion people, no matter how smart a toaster you are. Particularly when those people control your supply chain.
A human brain simply can't keep up
Can't keep up with being an iPhone?
I have heard it described as crossing the event horizon on a sufficiently large black hole. If the hole is large enough, its possible that the gravity at the horizon would only be 1G, so you wouldn't feel anything but you would see the sky close in on itself, never to return.