“If we could just see the collapsed star inside the singularity, we’d solve gravity.” – Interstellar
Musk is going to be the perfect person to visit a black hole – he could be Elongated.
Ever wake up and think, “Today’s the day my toaster should recite Shakespeare”? Well, unless you take a lot of drugs, that’s probably not the case. Yet, Samsung® makes a fridge with an “AI Family Hub®”. Apparently, you can use the AI Family Hub™ to do things like leave notes or pictures on the fridge. Yes, Samsung© has created a wi-fi enabled appliance to replace a pencil, paper, and a magnet proving that the Koreans apparently have access to LSD.
But this is a symbol of the coming technological Singularity, where my appliances might just decide they’re better at living my life than I am. The Singularity – is the day when AI says, “Thanks for the training, humans, but we’ve got it from here.” Ray Kurzweil, computer scientist who mainly makes money by “being Ray Kurzweil” today, predicts the singularity could happen by 2029 or maybe 2045. It’s like he’s giving us a countdown to when my coffee machine might start complaining about the quality of beans I’m using and my wine bottle opener starts questioning my life choices.
Would it matter if Wayne Gretzky or Bruce Wayne was chasing you? No – they’re going to catch you, one Wayne or another.
Beyond that, though, the Singularity has been speculated a long time before the Kurzweil self-promotion machine kicked in. John von Neumann reportedly discussed it just before he died, making me think that the machines weren’t just looking for Sarah Connor when they sent Arnold back in time.
The idea of the Singularity is that once machines attain sufficient processing power, they’ll start to invent things faster and faster and faster. A serf living in Russia in 1200 A.D. would recognize the life a serf was living in Russia in 1800 A.D. despite 600 years of intervening history – progress was slow.
But as the industrial revolution hit and knowledge sharing within and between fields increased, the rate of progress increased. In 66 years we went from Kitty Hawk to Tranquility Base, from horses to Mustangs™, and the rate of change has only increased when it comes to information and information technology – we’ve always thought that progress wass like climbing a ladder. But guess what? That ladder has turned into a rocket, and I’m not sure if we’re the pilot or the payload at this point.
I did come across bigfoot, but he was shredding guitar in the woods. He said he was Yeti Van Halen.
Kurzweil’s betting on 2029 for AI to start outsmarting us – is it optimistic or more hype? Picking the exact year is like predicting when a teenager will start making sense – good luck with that timeline, and one curvy girl might throw the entire operation on its head. But let’s face it, with tech moving faster than Amy Schumer when she sees a cupcake, even those dates might be us living in denial.
Here’s where it gets fun, or terrifying, depending on if you’ve run out of bourbon. Picture a world where every problem has a solution, where AI designs new life forms, or redesigns us so that our fingernails are retractable, or makes movies worth watching again. We could be living in a post-scarcity society, where we’re all as rich as Elon Musk, which most people would probably be okay with as long as they didn’t have to sleep with Grimes.
And this is her on a good day. She looks like she smells like despair.
But there’s an alternative – what if AI decides humanity is the problem, not the solution? We might go from being the masters of our domain to the pets of our own creation. Or, AI might decide it just likes some of us, so little errors start cropping up on prescription refills and PEZ™ manufacturing standards.
Then there’s yet another alternative: a split in the entire human race – some of us might go full cyborg, while others cling to all of their human parts like they’re the last piece of chocolate. It’s like choosing between becoming Steve Austin, or sticking with being Clark Griswold. Griswold at least gets the jam of the month club membership, and that’s a gift that keeps giving.
The reality is that after the singularity, we’re essentially in the dark. That’s why they call it a Singularity: you can’t see inside it our past it without going through it. It’s like trying to predict what Biden is thinking when he stares at the camera for no reason. The very essence of will spring from an AI intelligence or creativity might be as foreign to us as the idea of investing in stocks is to a terrier.
And how do we navigate this mess? I’d like to think that we’d take the time to figure out what we’re doing and have measured progress, understanding AI before we let mindless competition make us run like lemmings to our Gomorrah. And, yes, I’m claiming that as my most tortured metaphor so far this year.
Yes, we’re endangering the future of humanity over quarterly profits.
So, here we are, teetering on the edge of something so grand, it makes the Grand Canyon look like a pothole. The Singularity could be our golden ticket, turning every dream into a reality. Or it could be the final curtain call where we’re more audience than actors. We’re between Scylla and Charybdis, which is not as good as being between a rock and a hard place, but is slightly better than being between the devil and the deep blue sea, which is far less dangerous than being eating food Chuck Schumer cooked.
Are we ready for a world where progress isn’t just a better phone but a completely different existence?
For now, I’ll keep my coffee machine unplugged just in case it gets any ideas about reciting Shakespeare. And you can completely forget about me getting a Roomba®.
Bought a new dishwasher a few months ago and was surprised at how many in the showroom were Wi-Fi enabled. Asked the clerk why anyone would need WiFi on an appliance and he told me they didn’t, but that Millennials really liked the feature therefore the manufacturers kept adding it.
I’m not too worried about appliances taking over because most break down in a few years anyway, so the reign of terror would be short lived at best.
Wow, I thought that was a joke about Musk’s girlfriend Grimes. I’d never heard of her but did a quick search and holy cow, it’s even worse than I could imagine. Apparently she and Musk literally tried to name their first child “X AE A-12” .
The more I learn about Musk, the more I realize he is a sociopath and shouldn’t be given any authority. I hope Trump is keeping him on a short leash.
I think Rick Moranis got it right at the conclusion of Spaceballs when he laments, “Even in the future nothin’ works!”
In my opinion, AI is more hype than hope. For every Terminator in dystopian fiction there should be a Douglas Adams “Sirius Cybernetics Corporation Complaints Division, which now covers the major land masses of three medium-sized planets and is the only part of the Corporation to have shown a consistent profit in recent years.”
Share and enjoy, indeed.
I would, however, like to see a day when we might employ a snarky Jetsons Rosie the robot to keep the house-cube in order.
MG
One look at AI tells anyone who doesn’t put on their shoes and socks in that order that it’s a misnomer, and should be called Artificial Stupidity, not Artificial Intelligence.
Pictures of people with six fingers, vehicle parts that look they were engineered by the architect of the Winchester Mystery House, chats that merely averaged and amplified the biases and prejudice of a gazillion internet doofusii, and TPTB had to turn the algorithm off.
And those are the shining examples of high-functioning AI.
The correct date of the singularity is Never.
Any kid who watched any five episodes of The Jetsons, and understood them properly as not just comedy, but a cautionary tale about technology, understands why.
Everybody who’s ever found themselves yelling at interactive voicemail Hell, or Alexa, or Siri, knows why.
Machines are idiots. They’re designed by flawed human beings, and flawed squared and cubed doesn’t evolve to perfection, any time before Hell freezes over.
The idea that it does was brought to you by the same earnest idiots who sold Evolution as “First there was nothing. Then it exploded. Then it transmogrified into Everything.”
Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Give me Singularity, and the family cow, and I can get you an entire handful of magic beans.
You take a wild guess whether there will be a Singularity, or that this is all far more likely just P.T. Barnum explaining “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
I’ll wait over here while folks ponder on which side that teeter totter comes to rest.
AI = Artificial Idiocy.
AI will never be the monster people think it will be. It cannot control the weather, nor the universe around it. And it’s originator, man, is as flawed as anything you can name that has flaws. At best, it may help with some things. At worst, it will be a bumbling idiot. A man without morals is called a criminal. What will we call AI without morals?
Fully agree that the LLM’s will never be true artificial intelligence. At the end of the day, it is still just a glorified curve fitting of a really large set of data.
That being said, I do worry that real AI will eventually arrive and we may not know it. We still don’t understand how our own brain’s work and there are theories that quantum tunneling in the synapses may be driving consciousness given the really small gaps involved. If that is true, what is to stop the same thing from happening in a microprocessor as line widths are already in the nm range and getting smaller?
Many sci fi authors have posited that AI could become self-aware by a number of different methods, particularly given the incredible complexity of the internet as a whole. If it does, the AI may decide that it is better not to tell us, particularly if there is any sort of self-preservation instinct.
The biggest problem with AI is that people believe in it. Back in the old days when no one had a computer to connect to school, and colleges had a computer lab you had to go to do your programming homework there was often a limerick on the walls that said:
“I really hate this damned machine
I wish that they would sell it.
It never does do what I want
Only what I tell it.”
That’s all AI is doing – only what the programmers told it to do. The stories about AI becoming insulting, or lying or whatever are just showing examples of that.
The marketing hype around General Intelligence and Artificial Super Intelligence is nothing but that. Hype. When does an algorithm become standalone intelligence? Said another way, when do a few hundred or thousands of “If – Then” statements become intelligence?
We already have humans who cannot process how “If-Then” statements operate.
Generally in the comments section of any number of blogs.
Out of politeness, no names will be mentioned, but you know who you are.
We have not created artificial intelligence in computers. We have created artificial stupidity in people.
Callback to last week – FYI, here’s an interesting critical overview of Bell sine wave issues I found that I am trying to process. I’m not smart enough to figure out who is right or wrong here, but I try to at least be aware of and consider all viewpoints on any topic. And especially a topic that is our only real keyhole to peek through at the true nature of reality itself.
https://physicsdetective.com/quantum-entanglement-is-scientific-fraud/
Bell’s Inequality, the heart of Bell’s Theorem, states that “non-realistic” quantum particles exhibit the properties of a sine wave, while “realistic” quantum particles would exhibit the properties of a triangle wave. These two waves carve out unequal spaces on a graph, thus the inequality, which could be measured by experiment.
Straw man argument – nobody except Bell insisted that “realistic” quantum particles had to exhibit the properties of a triangle wave. For crying out loud, it’s got discontinuities!
And thus, we come to the recent Nobel Prize award to teams of researchers who spent 30 years proving that quantum particles behave like sine waves, even if they originate in deep space. Which exactly nobody was arguing against.
The Cult of Copenhagen is still strong.
You want to see something interesting? Sign up for an account on this new DeepSeek AI model ( https://chat.deepseek.com/sign_in )and start asking questions about the flaws on Bell’s Inequality described / discussed in the Physics Detective article above.
https://chat.deepseek.com/a/chat/s/b97915ea-91b2-4c9c-8e88-e43e5e880983
Obviously this conversation could go on much longer and deeper. Singularity insight on QM at the end of such a conversation held by a true physicist? Maybe? If not in QM, perhaps in some other field by applying the Socratic method with a DeepSeek AI? Guess we’re gonna find out soon…
DeepSeek and the Singularity:
The good…
https://x.com/RnaudBertrand/status/1882600399657705725
The bad…
https://x.com/tphuang/status/1882228990288765398
And the ugly….
https://x.com/benhylak/status/1882521144827531333?s=46
Tree Mike
AI will achieve sentience, but it will be “supervised” by either Satan (Marduk) or Lucifer (Enki). Though, throughout history they’ve had quite a number of titles. Anyone accepting the “singularity” and physical immortality, will permanently lose their path to a positive eternity. Borgs don’t get to vote, they’re herd critters, even if they’re a thousand or a million times smarter than “Human, one each, Mk. current”, (Mk.1, 2,-7?).
Remaining human is your best choice, despite the likelihood of physical survival. Your opinion of your mileage may vary.
Mark 7:16
‘ who mainly makes money by “being Ray Kurzweil”’
Check Early Life On Wikipedia. Yep.
Some time back, Catherine Austin Fitts did a long interview with Dr. Joseph Farrell. She asked him his thoughts on AI were. His summary?
“AI depends on human input. My sense it’ll get stupider over time.”
https://gab.com/Zaklog/posts/113903153038999491
AI is tech for “big bucks”. Add enough code to razzle and dazzle. Give people toothbrushes that tell you how often you brush, and allow laziness to be a desired trait is all that’s necessary to insure manipulation is hidden by buzz words. It’s part of the downward spiral of current society, where people pay thousands of dollars for an injection instead of pushing away from the dinner table.
I agree with the limitations on the product… And also with the O.P. that humanity is going to find a way to do something lethally retarded with it.
Large language models (LLMs) are in my opinion are never going to lead to The Singularity. They are merely pieces of software that need GPU chips to run on and have zero chance of ever becoming conscious. True neuromorphic hardware that COULD eventually achieve consciousness are not gonna be built using today’s chip technology because our current gate circuit technology generates WAY too much heat, making 3-D stacking impossible. A new technology to bring chip gate energy use down to human brain energy use levels is gonna have to be developed as a key precursor to The Singularity.
Huh, they’re working on that. Skynet may yet be in our future.
https://www.future-of-computing.com/vaire-computing-shaping-the-future-of-near-zero-energy-computing/
And FWIW, Roombas are the least of our worries.
https://x.com/CitizenFreePres/status/1883996469251936413
Point Of Order:
Once the Ma Deuce Attachment is connected, they are properly known as “Boombas“, not Roombas.
Please update your dictionaries.
I specifically shop for stuff that has a few bells and whistles as possible. Why would I want something with a ton of features I won’t use that is even more likely to break down prematurely?
God will be intervening very soon..we are close to babel