Diegetics

Listen up, there's a new religion in town, and it is very powerful, politically, financially and mechanically.

The Singularity Religion, the idea that we will create a super-being that is enough smarter than us that it can successively create upgrades of itself a la Moore's Law, that when its processing power reaches a certain capacity it will leap beyond the human ability to comprehend. This religion is gaining mainstream popularity as popular folk superstition, and even has a priesthood of highly educated nerds spreading its Evangel.

This is highly significant in a world where 3D printers are available for less than $ 2000. Google is a vast megalithic corporation that has access to the personal data of a huge proportion of citizens, building profiles on every single one of us who uses GMail, GChat, GCalendar or Google itself. They know where you are at any given moment if you are using a computer and interfacing with a format it's viewing. The men and women at Google are working very hard to make this beast even more intelligent. It is constantly being upgraded, given more power. Its motto of 'Don't Be Evil', is it reassuring or will it one day be a cruel joke?

The more we use computers the more keyed in to the vast extelligent system that is the internet. A vast demiurgos capable of consuming logos at quintillions of teraflops. We play a role in its resolution of problems. The notion of 'crowd-sourcing' is very much in this vein. Perhaps as perceptory organs, we will always serve a purpose for Molech made gears. There is a vast array of analytic tools available, with more every day. Natural Language Processing software can analyze different writing and see if it matches some kind of unique characteristics that help to identify the writer.

The military has robots that kill people now. They can fly and fire Hellfire missiles at a target while the pilot sits 1000 miles away.

We already view our worth by machine terms. We are 'workers', we value ourselves based upon 'productivity'. Our schools are designed to help us adapt to software compliance standards by the way the curriculum is arranged. It is a vast system that helps strip people from their families that they may be free to be workers who will follow the work. In short, we've been trained for the past 100 years to view ourselves as parts of a machine.

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Ahh pithtellect

Fontinau Are you saying we're going to continue reducing humanity to machines ad infinitum? Or were you just making a pithy comment about how their religion is stupid and will always seem to be 'just around the bend'?

Both of those religions are concentrated around the Bay Area in California. You might be on to something! Hot redhead Wiccan chicks for all!



Here's something I thought of. Say the Singularity occurs and a robot super-being does come into existence. Do you think that it will read more life-affirming literature or more life-negating literature on the internet? If it were to analyze and weight data on the human condition, do you think it would ultimately come to the conclusion that based on humanity's own reverence for itself humanity should be destroyed?

I think the problem is people thinking life can be defined.

it cant, its chaos and you either learn how to enjoy chaos or your spend your life with your head up your bottom wishing everyone was like you and their wasnt any nasty stress anymore.

I really suspect dreaming of peace is dreaming of death.

If we do evolve a super computer ala the culture - trying to guess its agenda would be impossible, by definition - with human hyperbole and hero worship I have no doubt it would be both a god and the devil.

Noddy

my fear is not of the machine but it's users. What I suspect is a mindless Molech that only resembles awareness enough to reflect our self back at us. A lobotomized behemoth that is missing things like creativity, empathy, intuition; you know the things that programmers might deem irrelevant. As such we may see millions dying to upload a copy of themselves that will have no connection to that other cognitively irrelevant factor experience. After all experience is merely a disjointed table of data.

I agree peace = death

If one insists in labeling the processes taking place in reality as "informational" (personally I don't find that a useful idea, nor tasty), then the computing power of a handful of rotting fish, ie the informational transactions taking place on, say, an assumed sub-quantum scale level of 10^-33cm with a processing speed of 500 yotta bits/vunda second, means there may be some more work to be done.

This also begs the question: if we create these ever growing processing powers within the Big-Processor of Life-Host itself... could this little parasite kill/eat the Host? That would seem necessary if one religiously believes in that type singularity where the Son eats the Father.

More likely, to keep the fantasy consistent, we already operate in a singularity. We can't cut it, rip it, let alone eat it alive. The singularity cannot even contain itself, for there is no self nor a container to keep it. Past and present are projections, probably produced by a brain that can only know itself via models about itself anyways, so any effort to know the singularity from the outside-in is entirely futile.

The hopefuls that project a journey towards a dreamed singularity may one day wonder why they never arrive there. Because the singularity has got us by the balls already? Or should we say.... God...