[sl4] Making a case for the communication singularity

[Brad Johnson-12]

  This must begin as a historical perspective of technological progress whereas communication is concerned. Some of which might be considered a re-hash of prior material or concepts. However, it is important for me to do so in order to create a projected trend line of ideas from which the reader might follow my train of thought.
  The wire itself was the birth of communication that mere words on paper printed by a press never could be. It allowed humanity to communicate instantly over vast distances. The tapping of code all too soon gave way to the human voice itself. This technology evolved to a wireless form of mass communication transmitted through the air by seemingly non-physical methods.
  It might be worth mentioning that this method was a one-way version of communication. One entity transmitted information and the recipient received what we loosely refer to as programming.  Over time our beloved technology evolved once again to include our primary sense as well. Television was in its own right a shocking injection of technology into the general cultures of humanity.
  Through the decades radio and telephone married to form the big brick of a cell phone so prevalent in the 1990’s. Telephone and personal computer married to form the internet. Now all of these technologies have evolved into a single device which can be held in the palm of a hand.
  One of the primary properties of technology itself is to become more powerful as time progresses. Another could be said to be that as it does, technology becomes smaller in physical size. This brings us to the era of transhumanism.
  Obviously this very powerful technology will continue to shrink in size over the next few years to become so small that it will be a burden to physically carry. It will be implanted in our physical being.  Now the ramifications of this can be considered because we are looking into the future and not at the past.
  Communications evolution will take on an air of the old science-fiction corniness of psychic phenomena and telekinesis. We actually will be able to read each other’s thoughts. Communication will evolve once again to something humanity has yet to seriously entertain due to emotional self-identification preservation considerations:  The hive mind.
  Saying ‘hive-mind’ is tantamount to slopping a chunk of still bleeding Bison buttocks on a crystal dinner table and bidding all present ‘bon appetite’.  To our present state of mind this is repulsive in many ways. A well trimmed, seasoned and cooked chunk of Bison buttocks can be savory to the sense of smell, sight and taste just as the concept of the dreaded hive-mind. Are we sure that we are looking at this in a practical light or are we being a bit over-emotional?
  I have read much over the past few months here about what I will call ‘hard A.I.’ and its programming, ramifications and implementations. You all dread the gray goo concept of the nanotechnological singularity as much as the hard A.I. super-presence rendering humanity obsolete in a matter of hours after its birth.
  Again I reiterate the light of perspective. In today’s society we form a belief with information and back it up with emotion ensuring that such ridiculous concepts as the world being flat would never change our minds even with geometrical discoveries such as ‘spheres’.
  Artificial intelligence is not something alien to humanity at all. It is an attempt to build a reflection of ourselves. Hard A.I. will not exist without our efforts to bring it about. Furthermore I am about to make the case that transhumanism could very likely occur before hard A.I. is created.
  MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games) video games will be the most likely conduit or spark for this. It will be something attractive for millions of people to be connected in a social medium that will eliminate the feelings of loneliness and isolation that define so much of our generation today. Even more: a person might feel left out to not be in it.
  In this perspective augmented intelligence could reap its very own communication singularity. A prevalence of instant thought communication would stifle the chaos of argument that plagues our society right now. Millions of minds augmented by the cool logic of computer enhanced human rationale would cut through years of debate and hot emotional wasted time and effort.
  The hive mind will be augmented by A.I. and transhumanity will no longer experience the sting of fear we now feel when considering the possibility of being ‘left out’ of the singularity and being completely replaced by big hard A.I. machines. Evolution leads us to what we have been heading towards all along: The marriage of humanity with communication itself. We are building our way to A.I. just as we build A.I. itself. In this fine respect we are not building our own demise but rather a method of success and long term survival.
   In my humble opinion the communication singularity is one of the most prevalent scenarios that draw us to the approach of transhumanism but it is not the only one. Another of the most likely candidates is the fascinating emergent nanotechnological singularity. If the possibility of having our mentality stored permanently on computer hardware leading us to our destined immortality is not a human enough transhumanism for your taste, then nanotechnologically enhanced physicality should be.
  In either regard the marriage of technology and humanity itself occurs on the front of communication. Nanotechnology will be an A.I. driven technology which will lead us down the omnipotent road of godhood itself.
  This is what we really are discussing here: The eventual evolution of a human being into godhood. Nanotechnologically enhanced human beings will want for naught. John wants a window beside him and the nanotechnology in his body communicates with the nanotechnology in his chair to the nanotechnology in the floor which orders the nanotechnology in the wall to reorganize itself into a window. Every whim fulfilled and desire realized with all the speed our methods of communication can provide us. John’s test tubes will slide across his desktop with but a thought that they should be exposed to the sunlight the window provides. This could be a full realization of the literal telekinesis I spoke of earlier.
  I feel certain that anyone reading this has smelled the wind of news about desktop nanofactories on the near horizon. Machines that will molecularly manufacture anything we program it to in our homes, which will lead to the marriage of refrigerators and microwave ovens at its finest to say the least.
  This is a fine concept but in my mind, it is already gone the way of the Dodo bird. Mind-machine interface will render it useless in the face of absolute immersion of A.I. enhanced nanotechnology into our physical reality. The grey goo you all fear will be every atom at our disposal and utilized by the true transhumanist mind of the future. The gray goo scenario will become impossible to accomplish in the face of transhumans who have gone through the communication singularity because our minds will literally control matter itself.
  And so the term coined ‘Singularity’ is true to its definition when transhumanism emerges due to only a few possible singularities having been realized. What happens afterwards is unknowable or imaginable by pre-transhumanist minds such as ours. What we can speculate is that at that point, the transhumans living after the various impending singularities have occurred will face yet another singularity because of them all. Might I be so bold as to coin the term ‘Supersingularity’?
  To speculate anything further would be just that. Certainly an emotional mind will flame that I have already speculated far too much already. This little rant has been written to allay some of the fears humanity is facing. The very idea of singularities is already far too much for a member of the general public to consider without baseless fear being generated by forcibly exposing them to the concepts. But something must be said, because you all know that freight train ‘approacheth’ and burying our heads in the sand won’t stop it. Be bold my beloved SL4 brethren.
-Slysar


     

[Vladimir Nesov]

On Mon, Sep 29, 2008 at 1:52 AM, Brad Johnson <shadow_slysar@...> wrote:
>  One of the primary properties of technology itself is to become more
> powerful as time progresses. Another could be said to be that as it does,
> technology becomes smaller in physical size. This brings us to the era
> of transhumanism.

It reminds me of a joke Marvin Minsky made in a TED talk (
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/marvin_minsky_on_health_and_the_human_mind.html
): "If you make people 6 inch high (by using nanotechnology, I
suppose), then you can have a 1000 times as many, that would solve the
problem [of overpopulation]".

Future determined by FAI is *optimized* to the inhuman degree. When
you think about a cool gadget, or a feature such as ability to conjure
physical objects by the command of thought, think how this feature
could be improved (even if it's a tiny silly detail), if you dedicate
the next million years of humanity's resources to this task, if you
don't mind *inventing* a perfect living butterfly, down to the atomic
level, just to add decoration to the background, if it turns out to be
the best solution. Then step back and try to imagine how the context
in which this feature applies can be improved: maybe you don't need
this particular gadget, maybe you need something else, maybe you
yourself should exist in a different form, maybe it all could mesh in
a unified jointly optimized edifice. Break every detail you imagined.
And if this process doesn't run on mere human minds, there is much
more potential to get the future better. Specific predictions break
down, but predictability of future shouldn't, on the most important
level, how it cumulatively satisfies the extension of our present
goals. You can't predict the next move of a chess master, but you
*know* he wins the game.

--
Vladimir Nesov
robotact@...
http://causalityrelay.wordpress.com/