| I appreciate the point of view this post is providing. It is always important to think about the potential limitations of AI, and the fact that once again, we may hit the ceiling of our current attempts at AI much more quickly than we realize, and no singularity will ever occur. We need to think about how to solve our problems realistically, now, without waiting for a godly super AI to come solve them for us. However, what's bizarre is that he is painting a world that is already wrong. In particular: "We won’t have massive, perfectly coordinated networks with optimised flow and distribution — think traffic networks (those self-driving Teslas that act as taxis when you don’t need them)" But... we will. We're already making it. It might not work very well at first, but automated cars are a real thing, and they are going to happen. We have preliminary automated cars right now. Perhaps he is instead claiming that our autonomous cars won't scale, but this too makes no sense. Of course we can make them scale. Once we've solved the hard problem, which is actually driving the cars around and not hitting things, solving distribution and flow is almost trivial. We have all sorts of systems for solving distribution problems and finding maximal flow along a network. There's even an entire class of algorithms to solve it with[1], which we currently use, right now, to solve things like scheduling airplane flights. And then he brings up a point that seems completely perpendicular to the entire rest of the post: "We won’t have total surveillance (à la Reynold’s Mechanism or Brin’s Transparent Society)" This has nothing to do with AI and everything to do with cryptography. Whether or not the singularity does or doesn't happen is completely irrelevant. Indeed, it currently looks like we're headed towards having total surveillance with or without the singularity, unless we do something about our privacy laws. While we shouldn't assume AI will fix all our problems, the examples provided in this post are bizarre, to say the least. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maximum_flow_problem |
The "singularity" is really just 17th-century metaphysics. It's Rene Descartes all over again imbued with religious undertones of salvation and transcendence. Most of the "aspirations" of its occurrence are nonsense. Kurzweil has fashioned himself like an AI prophet. For some reason, it has caught on among people, some very smart, and has lead to this general passive-ness to solving real problems today. The "singularity" becomes the answer for everything, "it's definitely coming!"