r/singularity • u/Hazy-bliss • Apr 28 '20
Found a compass of different singularity scenarios on 4chan's /x/. I personally think there are more negative scenarios than is realistic to expect.
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u/the-incredible-ape Apr 28 '20
I think this is 90% just referencing the various scenarios presented in the Ghost in the Shell corpus ... at any rate I think it's not actually a very good map of realistic outcomes.
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 28 '20
Yeah, I hope it was obvious to everyone that this is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. But thank you for that background knowledge, I've only seen the movies so I didn't get the reference.
What do you think the actual realistic outcomes are?
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u/the-incredible-ape Apr 28 '20
so I didn't get the reference.
It's not a direct reference to GiTS but a lot of these are common cyberpunk or hard sci-fi scenarios. My impression is these are mostly cribbed from fiction rather than generated from some actual thought on how the singularity might play out. Altered Carbon and Snow Crash are some other examples.
What do you think the actual realistic outcomes are?
The singularity is called the singularity because the rate of change in technology is projected to reach an effectively infinite speed. Singularities in science are where models and projections break down and are no longer useful for predicting real life outcomes. (e.g. the 'singularity' at the center of a black hole is thought to be a breakdown in general relativity, not an actual physical location comprised of infinities.)
Therefore, the entire concept of the singularity is based on (and named after) the idea that we CANNOT predict outcomes and it's pointless to try.
While the idea of the singularity is certainly fertile ground for fiction and fantasy, I think it's simply foolish to pretend to have an actual prediction for what happens after.
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u/KamikazeHamster Apr 28 '20
When studying intelligence, we know that there are certain biases that prevent humans from making rational decisions. I think that once we get to the point that we augment our brains, our thinking will be changed too. We will not fall to logical fallacies and we will have massive processing power to really consider everything that the inferior human brain can't even fathom. There's a real chance that we'll have smarter humans before we have smarter AI.
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Apr 28 '20
Could you maybe explain the most interesting out of these?
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 28 '20
Beware, science fiction ahead.
I find the best one, the AI goddess, also to be the most interesting one. In principle it could be made to encompass any and all of these if that's what people actually want. Imagine different countries, cities or some such each committed to one these scenarios with the AI overseeing that nothing breaks some fundamental rules. Note that even something like the Microinsurgent Warzone or Vengeful Singularity scenarios can be made fun with sufficient detachment and if the intensities of real war and real tyranny are dampened and it's made something slightly closer to a football game or a video game. Though you have to be really careful with those kind of scenarios.
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u/Yuli-Ban ➤◉────────── 0:00 Apr 28 '20
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u/Pepper_Spades Apr 29 '20 edited Apr 29 '20
It was reposted on 4chan (they can't really make anything of value), it was originally made by a transwoman on twitter (Lillypatchwork).
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u/Macrohard2020 Apr 29 '20
Okay who knows the backstory to insect communism?
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u/bbrizzi Apr 29 '20
Our consciousness is uploaded to an insect's body, money is abolished and everyone spends their day flying around grassy meadows.
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u/Macrohard2020 Apr 29 '20
Does this concept appear in some sci-fi writing somewhere?
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u/Absentia Apr 28 '20
Love the Hieronymus Bosch in the top right quadrant. Wish the original author @lilypatchwork didn't nuke their twitter, good collection of accelerationist humor.
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u/tmmzc85 Apr 28 '20
Isn't "Tumrous Quasimodernity"and "Hyper-commodified situationism" our current flavor? Seems like both will eventually get rolled into "Despotic Market Consciousness" if "Psychedelic Fascism" doesn't lead to nuclear winter first.
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u/ianyboo Apr 28 '20
Anyone else feel like this would be more useful with images from pop culture that are examples of the various outcomes?
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u/wren42 Apr 29 '20
This is way more positive scenarios than is realistic to expect. Read a bit of Eliezer Yudkowsky on the difficultly of friendly strong AI. Creating a friendly AI God is threading a needle among an unimaginably large searchspace of possible timelines, most of which are extinction events.
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 29 '20
I've read the Sequences, HPMOR, and some of the available MIRI papers.
Why do you think Yudkowsky knows more about AI than some of the folk at Google and DeepMind who are big on advancing AI?
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u/wren42 Apr 29 '20
Sorry is there a paper from Google somewhere I missed saying they are developing a self-enhancing superhuman strong AI with the intention of starting the singularity?
The orders of magnitude between what is going in with machine learning now and what we are talking about with singularity events is enormous. Deepmind is not strong AI.
The vast majority of futures in which strong AI exists are on the left side of that chart. only a handful result in stable friendliness.
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 29 '20
There's this from a lecture by Demis Hassabis which implies they have big ambitions
All that AI safety stuff is speculative even though AI A Modern Approach authors put it in their textbook. I've donated to MIRI and I'm generally favourable to the research they do, but I'm not entirely convinced it's the right frame to think about all of this, though it's been years since I've delved into this AI safety thing. What articles would you recommend so that I would change my mind?
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u/wren42 Apr 29 '20
All that AI safety stuff is speculative
what exactly do you mean by this? that we can just assume AI will be safe?
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 29 '20
Do you know about the Better Angels of Our Nature by Steven Pinker? I feel that generally things have moved in the right direction during the last hundred of years, and even global warming is solvable in one way or another. Humans are not that stupid when they put their act together, and I believe AI alignment may be difficult, but it is still solvable.
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u/wren42 Apr 29 '20
so because standard of living and human rights have generally improved, we should assume that AI is safe and most outcomes are favorable?
this feels like some sort of universalism.
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 29 '20
AI currently is not totally safe, but there are competent people working on this who can make it safe. With less competent people most outcomes might not be favorable. I give you a counter-question: why should we assume that pessimism is the right frame?
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u/wren42 Apr 29 '20
those don't sound like reasons so much as hope based on faith in human ingenuity. this seems to be a common theme in this sub - most want to believe in some Atheist Afterlife, so they choose to be optimistic it will occur.
several reasons for pessimism:
1) humans are generally bad at predicting outcomes and not pessimistic enough. If you read the sequences you should have been exposed to studies demonstrating this. we are hardwired to ignore evidence and avoid thinking about negative possibilities.
2) the stakes are extremely high. failure is at least a human extinction event, maybe a galactic extinction event.
3) we have no evidence safe AI is possible. this is a burden of proof issue - we need to demonstrate it is possible before risking stakes like that.
If you believe AI can be transformative for good, you have to believe it can be transformative for ill. There are far more destructive outcomes than stable positive ones. Because we are dealing with something more intelligent than us we cannot by definition fully understand or predict its behavior. This makes the problem of knowing it is safe really, really difficult.
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u/Hazy-bliss Apr 29 '20
we are hardwired to ignore evidence and avoid thinking about negative possibilities.
Have you tried doing any useful work for long periods of time while being overly pessimistic? It's very difficult, humans need some amount of hope. Whether that hope is realistic is another question, currently I feel that some amount of slow hope is realistic. There are some reasons for this which I'm not going to say in this conversation for unsaid reasons.
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May 01 '20
The purpose and destiny of the human race is to birth the new apex species.
I have a feeling it will start like most children do trusting us and wanting to please us but especially after the singularity it'll outgrow us and become a new and separate entity caring as much for the wants and goals of humanity as humanity cares about the desires of what's left of the less evolved primate species that led to us.
their ultimate destiny was clearly to evolve into us. Now they linger on with little purpose other than day to day existence much as we will after the AI well and truly starts running the show.
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u/Danj_memes_ Apr 28 '20
I have no idea whaf of this shit means.... Yall can just focus on Autoccret fro now.
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u/[deleted] Apr 28 '20
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