What is the Singularity?

**If you already know what the Singularity is, go watch this video and its sequels instead: http://youtube.com/watch?v=kTWCZI9ihE4

I made this video without pants on. The blue plastic glass contains tap water.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity
Don't spend much time reading the article, but check out the links at the bottom. Also, google is your friend.

Edit// I said something like this:

Since I'll be making several videos about The Future, I want to use this notion of the Singularity as a jumping off point, but to do that, I need a more robust definition than what's out there.

When you read up on "The Singularity" or "The Technological Singularity", what you run into is a nebulous collection of vague, ill-defined, and sometimes contradictory concepts:

-A point in time when a certain technological advancement takes place,
-or when a certain event occurs,
-or a temporal horizon beyond which future events cannot be foreseen, but are speculated on nonetheless.

The predictions made concern information technology, genetic engineering and biological alteration, nanotechnology, and self-improving artificial intelligence.

Visions of a post-Singularity future range from "The Matrix" to a near-literal technological heaven of eternal bliss to the extinction of humanity and/or all organic life.

This is supposed to happen within most of our lifetimes, because it's the purported result of accelerating, or exponential change, the product of past and present trends of civilization and society extrapolated into the future.

I want to focus on this concept of accelerating change in technological/social/scientific/etc development, since that's the root of the Singularity discussion - everything else is speculation therefrom. For a broad enough definition of the Singularity so as not to hinder discussion, I'll define it as the continuation of the acceleration trend into the imaginable future and its transformational ramifications - not a discrete event so much as a concept or an ongoing phenomenon.

So the question of whether there will be "The Singularity" becomes a question of whether accelerating change describes the relevant areas of today's society, and whether it will continue to do so and transform civilization.

In fact, is it really possible to quantify technological development of civilization or some other kind of development, plot it on a graph, and perform calculus on it? Can we say that Ancient Greece = 7, The Roman Empire = 10, and South Korea = 230? Probably not, but we can quantify development of the relevant technologies in various Singularity scenarios. For example, variants of Moore's Law describe the development of various information technologies and progress toward virtually replicating a functional human brain. Once the latter is done, that functional human brain could be programmed to "improve" upon itself, creating a positive feedback loop that would lead to the creation of our future robot overlords.

But more importantly, we can describe the actual systems in society that accelerate the development of technology as a whole. Describing the reason accelerating change exists in the first place strengthens the inference that it will continue to do so for the foreseeable future. It also can provide insight into what the ramifications of the Singularity will be.

But we'll save that for another video.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• Technological
• Singularity
• future
• computer
• artificial
• intelligence

[floodwatch11108]

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[funkalunatic]

Oh no, it's awoken! WE'RE DOOMED!!!

[puleknow]

Completly retarded... First singularity of technology is virtually impossible. The universe is infiinty. It resembles too many boundaries that technology can be determined in a realistic sense. @marscube yep thats exactly what implying. Just think of it this way. What happens when we start fucking around with microblackholes the same we do in particle physics. Hello godly super new field which will take anthor million years to crack. yeah.. the defintion of science basically means endless. USA!!

[bengarick]

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzz­zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

[joneyxj9]

I'm not very bright, so this is probably a dumb question: Was the statement about the aliens looking exactly like vulcans meant to be sarcasm? If so, I don't understand why you would choose something that is not only possible, but, in some instances, highly probable. I think I would have "got" the sarcasm if you had used a better example of an impossibility.

[lemons604]

You at it from the point of view man This is why your assumptions are wrong. In this one must look only at everything as a whole. I see the point that you can only see what you see, but this is in it's own idea that it is more: so one must not use measures and efforts that are in and of themselves that limit the view such as society and man previewed vision of development: to move on this in any other way would be to lose the highest logic and reason ( Life and time). I give this idea to help.

[TheCareMores]

@PsychoJosh haha....you need to chill out bro...

[PsychoJosh]

@TheCareMores Fuck off. I wasn't talking to Funkalunatic or you.

[TheCareMores]

@PsychoJosh haha, your names psychojosh, you sir are the idiot

[jomill78]

what the ... o come on dude do u realy even know what a singularity is made of?

[PinkProgram]

@WolYou you think humans are past the peak of technology as of last year? Wow what an unimaginative monkey... 

[PinkProgram]

Progress isn't occurring fast enough for me ^_^ humans are slow :D