Luddite - is the Singularity near?

It's Water...

The world is facing an imminent water crisis, with demand expected to outstrip the supply of fresh water by 40% by the end of this decade, experts have said on the eve of a crucial UN water summit. From a report: Governments must urgently stop subsidising the extraction and overuse of water through misdirected agricultural subsidies, and industries from mining to manufacturing must be made to overhaul their wasteful practices, according to a landmark report on the economics of water. Nations must start to manage water as a global common good, because most countries are highly dependent on their neighbours for water supplies, and overuse, pollution and the climate crisis threaten water supplies globally, the report's authors say. Johan Rockstrom, the director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and co-chair of the Global Commission on the Economics of Water, and a lead author of the report, told the Guardian the world's neglect of water resources was leading to disaster. "The scientific evidence is that we have a water crisis. We are misusing water, polluting water, and changing the whole global hydrological cycle, through what we are doing to the climate. It's a triple crisis." Rockstrom's fellow Global Commission on the Economics of Water co-chair Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London and also a lead author of the report, added: "We need a much more proactive, and ambitious, common good approach. We have to put justice and equity at the centre of this, it's not just a technological or finance problem."

https://science.slashdot.org/story/23/03/17/175225/global-fresh-water-demand-will-outstrip-supply-by-40-by-2030-say-experts

In a world in need of fresh/drinking water, why the AI?

Event Horizon

Movies and books (SciFi) pick up the energies of the collective subconsciousness and address these with their themes, and I realize that meanwhile we entered something I call the event horizon, the story lines do break.

Let us assume in some future, maybe in 30 years (~2050) there will be an event, either the takeoff of the Technological Singularity, or the collapse of human civilization by ecocide followed by a human ELE, or something I call the Jackpot scenario (term by William Gibson), where every possible scenario happens together at once. If we assume that there will be such a kind of event in future, then I guess we are already caught in its event horizon, and there is no route to escape anymore.

Negative Feedback Loop

...one major topic of this blog was AI vs. ELE, takeoff of the Technological Singularity vs. Extinction Level Event. There is already a negative feedback loop of the ELE present:

'Taiwan is facing a drought, and it has prioritized its computer chip business over farmers.'

'U.S. Data Centers Rely on Water from Stressed Basins'

'Musk Wades Into Tesla Water Wars With Berlin’s “Eco Elite”'

With an incoming ELE, is there still enough momentum in pipe for the TS to take off?

TS Feedback Loop

DeepMind has created an AI system named AlphaCode that it says "writes computer programs at a competitive level." From a report:
The Alphabet subsidiary tested its system against coding challenges used in human competitions and found that its program achieved an "estimated rank" placing it within the top 54 percent of human coders. The result is a significant step forward for autonomous coding, says DeepMind, though AlphaCode's skills are not necessarily representative of the sort of programming tasks faced by the average coder. Oriol Vinyals, principal research scientist at DeepMind, told The Verge over email that the research was still in the early stages but that the results brought the company closer to creating a flexible problem-solving AI -- a program that can autonomously tackle coding challenges that are currently the domain of humans only. "In the longer-term, we're excited by [AlphaCode's] potential for helping programmers and non-programmers write code, improving productivity or creating new ways of making software," said Vinyals.

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/22/02/02/178234/deepmind-says-its-new-ai-coding-engine-is-as-good-as-an-average-human-programmer

TS Feedback Loop

Google is using AI to design its next generation of AI chips more quickly than humans can. Designs that take humans months can be matched or beaten by AI in six hours

https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/10/22527476/google-machine-learning-chip-design-tpu-floorplanning

Introducing GitHub Copilot: your AI pair programmer

Today, we are launching a technical preview of GitHub Copilot, a new AI pair programmer that helps you write better code. GitHub Copilot draws context from the code you’re working on, suggesting whole lines or entire functions. It helps you quickly discover alternative ways to solve problems, write tests, and explore new APIs without having to tediously tailor a search for answers on the internet. As you type, it adapts to the way you write code—to help you complete your work faster.

Developed in collaboration with OpenAI, GitHub Copilot is powered by OpenAI Codex, a new AI system created by OpenAI. OpenAI Codex has broad knowledge of how people use code and is significantly more capable than GPT-3 in code generation, in part, because it was trained on a data set that includes a much larger concentration of public source code. GitHub Copilot works with a broad set of frameworks and languages, but this technical preview works especially well for Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, Ruby and Go. 

https://github.blog/2021-06-29-introducing-github-copilot-ai-pair-programmer/

On Peak Human

One of the early Peak Human prophets was Malthus, in his 1798 book, 'An Essay on the Principle of Population', he postulated that the human population growths exponentially, but food production only linear, so there will occur fluctuation in population growth around an upper limit.

Later Paul R. Ehrlich predicted in his book, 'The Population Bomb' (1968), that we will reach an limit in the 1980s.

Meadows et al. concur in 'The Limits of Growth - 30 years update' (2004),  that we reached an upper limit already in the 1980s.

In 2015 Emmott concludes in his movie 'Ten Billion' that we already passed the upper bound.

UNO predictions say we may hit 9 billion humans in 2050, so the exponential population growth rate already declines, but the effects of an wast-fully economy pop up in many corners.

Now, in 2018, we are about 7.4 billion humans, and i say Malthus et al. were right.

Is is not about how many people Earth can feed, but how many people can live in an comfortable but sustainable manner.

What does Peak Human mean for the Technological Singularity?

The advent of Computers was driven by the exponential population growth in the 20th century. All the groundbreaking work was done in the 20th century.

When we face an decline in population growth, we also have to face an decline in new technologies developed.

Cos it is not only about developing new technologies, but also about maintaining the old knowledge.

Here is the point AI steps in, mankind's population growth alters, but the whole AI sector is growing and expanding.

Therefore the question is, is AI able to take on the decline?

Time will tell.

I guess the major uncertainty is, how Moore's Law will live on beyond 2021, when the 4 nm transistor production is reached, what some scientists consider as an physical and economical barrier.

I predict that by hitting the 8 billion humans mark, we will have developed another, groundbreaking, technology, similar with the advent of the transistor, integrated circuit and microchip.

So, considering the uncertainty of Peak Human vs. Rise of AI,
i give +-0 points for the Singularity to take off.

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