Luddite - is the Singularity near?

Exit Strategy?

Oh boy. ELE ongoing, humans go extinct, biosphere goes extinct, Mars and Moon have no self-sustaining biosphere, the only thing which still has gas is the AI. Which exit strategy to choose? The good ole Marvin Minsky upload scenario? Seriously? A post-human Matrix? Let go of the old, embrace the new? Project Lambda. Oh boy.

Western Peak Passed?

I am a child of the 90s, 1989 til 2001 was my time, the fall of the Berlin Wall until the 9/11, everything seemed possible during this period. Fukuyama mentioned it "the end of history", and then 2001 was already "the end of the end of history".

Retrospectively, Fukuyama was wrong, and Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations", was right. Maybe the 90s were just a hedonistic time in between, the exception of the rule.

True, technologically we do advance, at least incrementally, more processing power, more bandwidth, more data, bigger neural networks, more advanced network architectures, but cultural, philosophical? Did we, the Western sphere, already pass our peak and do degenerate?

- 1979 - Lyotard - The Postmodern Condition
- 1981 - Baudrillard - Simulacra and Simulation
- 1997 - Deutsch - The Fabric of Reality
- 1999 - Wachowskis - The Matrix

When I surf the meme-sphere out there, it seems to me that meanwhile the so called three poisons rule the world, hate, greed and delusion....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_poisons

...just thinking loud.

We Are Running Out of Juice

The AI competes already with humans for resources, water and energy, and, it seems we are running out of juice...do we have enough resources left for the TS to take off, or, did we enter already the ELE doom loop?

Elon Musk Predicts Electricity Shortage in Two Years
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/23/07/31/0128257/elon-musk-predicts-electricity-shortage-in-two-years

"I can't emphasize enough: we need more electricity,"

"However much electricity you think you need, more than that is needed."

TS - it's here

...TS, it's here.

Modern Turing Test Proposed

DeepMind Co-Founder Proposes a New Kind of Turing Test For Chatbots

Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of DeepMind, suggests chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard should be put through a "modern Turing test" where their ability to turn $100,000 into $1 million is evaluated to measure human-like intelligence. He discusses the idea in his new book called "The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-first Century's Greatest Dilemma." Insider reports: In the book, Suleyman dismissed the traditional Turing test because it's "unclear whether this is a meaningful milestone or not," Bloomberg reported Tuesday. "It doesn't tell us anything about what the system can do or understand, anything about whether it has established complex inner monologues or can engage in planning over abstract time horizons, which is key to human intelligence," he added. The Turing test was introduced by Alan Turing in tnewhe 1950s to examine whether a machine has human-level intelligence. During the test, human evaluators determine whether they're speaking to a human or a machine. If the machine can pass for a human, then it passes the test. Instead of comparing AI's intelligence to humans, Suleyman proposes tasking a bot with short-term goals and tasks that it can complete with little human input in a process known as "artificial capable intelligence," or ACI. To achieve ACI, Suleyman says AI bots should pass a new Turing test in which it receives a $100,000 seed investment and has to turn it into $1 million. As part of the test, the bot must research an e-commerce business idea, develop a plan for the product, find a manufacturer, and then sell the item. He expects AI to achieve this milestone in the next two years. "We don't just care about what a machine can say; we also care about what it can do," he wrote, per Bloomberg.

Will it be a butterfly?

The technosphere is eating up the complete biosphere, earth's biomass is replaced with silicon, the closed, biological entropy system is being replaced by an technological negentropy system. Question, if we assume (human++) technology is an parasite to Gaia's biosphere, will it be a butterfly?

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.

Home - Top