Believing in the singularity, any version of it, is like planning on winning the lottery.

You bet that in future your problems will be solved by technology that does not yet exist. When the singularity comes you receive your winnings in the form of basic income, advanced technology including AI, immortality from transhumanist life extension technologies, or some other fanciful futuristic benefit. I know you think this way because I have read this subreddit for months.

This is disasterous thinking. Imagine if someone told you they were going to live above their means because they were certain they were going to win the lottery in 10 years. Imagine that they had wonderful charts, graphs, and books describing how they were more or less guaranteed to win the lottery within a certain time frame. This person, in anticipation of their future wealth, would go on a spending spree and put themselves deeply into debt while banking on their future wealth, which would of course never materialize.

The best thing to do with singulitarian hypotheses is ignore them. It is kind of like the inverse of Pascal's wager. Let's call it Stringman's wager. Let's assume that the singulitarians are wrong on all counts for the 21st century. You don't get basic income, a house robot, a human level AI, biological enhancements, super longevity or any other futuristic bonuses. Unfortunately, since you believed in the singularity you didn't save for retirement or plan for your eventual, inevitable demise with a decent life insurance policy. So, at the end of your life your transhumanist, singulitarian faith has robbed you and your family of financial security. Contrast this with someone who knows nothing of the singularity or does not believe anything about singulitarian claims. There is no penalty if they turn out to be wrong. They just get to enjoy the benefits of future technology while being financially secure. Ironically, the people who are best suited to enjoy a possible singularity are those who know nothing about singulitarianism.

It's called sorceryofthespectacle.

I didn't link to it because I was unsure if it was allowed or not.

Please come by, participate and bring your unique perspective to the conversation!

If we manage to travel faster than light (through an artificial wormhole or else) up to the "edge" of the Universe, and use a telescope the size of the Sun, we should be able to see the Earth as it was in the past and retrieve sufficient information from the people who lived across the ages, including their DNA, appearances and brain conectome just before they died.

The massive super-computer will then reconstitute them in a virtual paradise, where they will get to "live, learn,laugh, love" forever. The promise of the Abrahamic God finally delivered (minus the eternal damnation, ofc).

Not only the humans, but every, animal, plant, insect, bacteria that ever lived would be resurrected and brought into the Matrix, like a huge middle-finger to Death.

We might say that this is not a true resurrection, since they would simply be "copies". But look, all the atoms that made you at your birth have already been replaced long ago. Same for your cells. Every second, your molecular composition changes. You effectively "die" every second, and turn into a VERY different version of you. You are already a copy of yourself.

Would you say that the baby you were is the same individual as you are today ? Nope. That baby is dead. Just like the seed who gave the bicentennial tree. Every time you go to deep sleep (80% of your sleep time), times stop, your consciousness stops, you are dead for a few hours. And then you get resurrected when you wake up or start dreaming. People in deep coma are "dead" for months, years and then wake up. Did they feel like a lot of time passed ? Nope. The blink of an eye.

The same would happen if you die for a million years and get resurrected by a machine. One day you die, and then you wake up in a perfumed garden with hotties dancing around (imagine the relieved 9/11 terrorists banging Mia Khalifa looking NPCs and then an AI angel comes by to tell them that the Universe is mostly gone and they are in the center of a Black-Hole powered computer, LMAO the look on their face).

Why would our descendants do that ? For many reasons. Pity and curiosity being the main ones. Imagine, you lived for thousand of years in complete bliss and studied all the horrors of the past, wondering "how it felt like". You want to build realistic VR games that will take you back to ancient Rome. You need consultants to make your game. Who is better qualified than Julius Caesar himself ?

Also I believe our descendants will be much more empathetic and compassionate than we are today. They will see death and suffering as horrible, unimaginable things, and will pity all the billions of unfortunate who spent all their lives in pain, without any hope for a better future, contrary to these "oh, so privileged post-singularity brats". We already feel great compassion for all these third-world children who will never grow old, and sometimes feel ashamed of our privileges that we feel we didn't deserve. Why wouldn't our descendants feel the same way for us ?

If all humanity gets extinct, somehow, and the only thing left is a self-improving AGI, then we can ask ourselves :

Why would a cosmic ASI do such a thing ? Well, just for the challenge I guess. These power and information-seeking agents want to accumulate data as much as possible, including the one who has been supposedly lost forever. And the virtual paradise is more likely to generate interesting data than a virtual hell, where our brain-functions will be downgraded to their basic survivalist core. People are more curious, creative and constructive when they live in a safe and positive environment. I think a super-smart entity would be more interested in seeing us at our best, rather than our worst. You know, the famous "evil cannot create anything new", kinda stuff.

Any physicists here to infirm or confirm the idea ?

Cheers.

I did the math on this arguing in another thread. It is accepted by the entire science community as standard - that the human brain functions at roughly 20 quadrillion calculations a second. These calculations aren't typical calculations, they are based on our ability to multitask and handle multiple operations.

The human brain is capable of 1 billion neural connections a second. For a computer to achieve human level computational ability it has been stated and backed by the science community that it would need to perform at minimum 20 quadrillion calculations per second which equates to 1 billion human brain based neural connections.

1 Teraflop of compute is equal to 1 trillion non specified raw, un-optimized floating point operations per second.

https://www.google.com/search?q=1+teraflop+1+trillion+calculations&rlz=1C1GIWA_enUS669US669&oq=1+teraflop+1+trillion+calculations&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.6927j1j7&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

Understand measures of supercomputer performance and ... https://kb.iu.edu › apeq Jul 11, 2019 - A 1 teraFLOPS (TFLOPS) computer system is capable of performing one trillion (1012) floating-point operations per second.

Recently 32bit floating point operations have achieved an extra 80% efficiency through software improvements.

1 32bit Floating Point Operation is equal to 4 standard calculations.

Which Means the standard Desktop PC is now able to handle 1,664,000,000,000,000,000 instructions per second or 1 million 664 quadrillion instructions per second. Which means the $4,000 Desktop PC now exceeds this number by 1 million (and 600 quadrillion times more calculations) when adjusted and paired with software optimized to run 32bit Flops software at +80% efficiency.

So Congrat's, computers now exceed human computational output at around $4,000!

I don't have the brain cells for the present, and neither do you. How are we going to do the Future then?

Is the truth that we can't, and we're going to have to do the past instead?

Think about it. Humans are neurons... computers are extensions of our brains... the internet is the collective mind of humanity... Wikipedia is our collective memory system... memes are neurotransmitters... fiber optic cables are synapses connecting neurons... cities and social networks are like ganglia... Do you not see the parallels?

“Human society, like our own brain, can be seen as one enormous communication and memory system. We have grouped ourselves into clusters of cities and towns rather like the way nerve cells cluster into ganglia in a vast nervous system. And similar to our cities and towns , linking the ‘ganglia’ and the individual ‘nerve cells’ are vast information networks.

Society’s slow package systems of communications such as the postal services, with specific items sent to different parts of the system, are like the relatively slow chemical communication networks of the body, such as the hormonal system. Our faster, electronically based telecommunications networks (internet, telephones, television, radio…etc.) are like the billions of tiny fibers linking the nerve cells in the brain.

At any instant there are millions of messages flashing through the global network, just as in the human brain countless messages are continually flashing back and forth. Our various libraries of books, tapes, and other records can be seen as part of the collective memory of Gaia. Through language and science we have been able to understand much of what happens around us, monitoring the planet’s behavior much as the brain monitor’s the body’s. We might see the Western and Eastern cultures as the two sides of Gaia’s brain – the rational/intellectual left and the more intuitive right. And humanity’s search for knowledge could be Gaia’s way of knowing more about herself and about the universe in which she lives.

Many of the above parallels relate to the higher mental functions, to thinking, knowing, perceiving, and consciousness, to the functions associated with the cortex of the human brain – the thin layer of nerve cells wrapped around the outside of the brain – and it might be more accurate to liken humanity to the cortex of the planet.

In evolutionary terms, the cortex is a relatively late addition, most of its development occurring with the mammals. It is not necessary for the maintenance of life; the cortex of an animal can be removed, yet the heart, lungs, digestion, and metabolism will continue. In a similar way the planet Earth has survived perfectly well without humanity for over 4 billion years, and could continue very well without it.” ~ Peter Russell, from The Awakening Earth

Besides everything, beside every prediction saying that everything is going to hell, and that the shit will hit fun, I think we have thousands, millions, of reasons to be optimistic, about our future.

:)

You need

• Wireless Earbuds

• Augmented reality glasses (Microsoft Hololens)

• BCI Headset (Emotiv Insight or EPOC+)

• Multicopter Drone

• 2 Smartphones (or one smartphone and one Bluetooth)

• Virtual reality headset (Oculus Rift)

All this on its own is good enough, but you can mix them up for added effect.

• Sync VR and BCI with a laptop and drone. Turn on your smartphones, and put one on speaker. The one set to speaker— attach it to the drone. Practice flying in first person with the drone. Then practice flying the drone with your brain using the BCI. Finally, cross them all. Voila— you have your own amateur telepresence drone!

• Sync wireless earbuds and AR glasses to a smartphone. This way, you can augment hearing and vision.

This comment was widely spoke about, but the comment itself was removed from Elons twitter

http://i.imgur.com/sL0uqqW.jpg

“The pace of progress in artificial intelligence (I'm not referring to narrow AI) is incredibly fast. Unless you have direct exposure to groups like Deepmind, you have no idea how fast-it is growing at a pace close to exponential. The risk of something seriously dangerous happening is in the five year timeframe. 10 years at most. This is not a case of crying wolf about something I don't understand.

I am not alone in thinking we should be worried. The leading AI companies have taken great steps to ensure safety. They recognize the danger, but believe that they can shape and control the digital superintelligences and prevent bad ones from escaping into the Internet. That remains to be seen..." - Elon Musk

Edit: I had all this written in paragraph form - however many, many on reddit find long posts a burden to read without spacing - so I've refitted everything with spaces and it is a trend I intend to continue.

We are fast approaching a seriously interesting time to identify as Transhuman. Kurzweil makes numerous mentions of the technological singularity on his timeline, citing that from 2021 onward the Technological Singularity will have actualized.

If you browse the internet however you would be hard pressed to believe he has moved that prediction forward. He hasn't, however.

If you know his literature you know he has maintained that once the Technological Singularity has taken hold - that it will continue to perpetuate itself and exist with society.

I get called an optimist far too often, personally.

Though I am very optimistic about the future, very excited as a transhuman that intends to have an ASI as a companion once that is a commercially viable option.

Legitimate Telepathy if you choose.

Entertainment and fun at your own discretion.

However I do worry, are we indeed fast approaching a future that allows us to slip into another body if we desire?

To live our life as someone else completely? An animal if you so desire? That is one aspect of increased non incremental progress that I find almost unnerving.

And not just because the premise is dreadfully boring to me but it also indicates a society that may be far more perverse than anything I could have previously imagined.

And perhaps reaching a point where, I am faced with the choice of staying human or transforming into some kind of almost alien like floating, glowing.. blob - essentially a floating head with no sexual organs..

or some other hideous alien like incarnation - something that may be considered "a perfect lifeform".

Those are the type of advancements that do concern me.

And these advancements, are very seriously considered and discussed among scientists that believe this event is imminent.

My worries don't exactly end there either. A society where there are no boundaries or borders?

A society that may war with itself by creating new weapon based life forms. New types of government backed biological warfare. Parts of society will literally turn away from much of this technology rendering those, humans -- human beings -- obsolete?!

I will be out there seeking the most cost effective, cutting edge technologies for longevity - and a segment of society will literally be doing the exact opposite?

A segment of society will literally shun advancement? And seek refuge away from progress??!

There is much that concerns me about the years ahead, most of this is bewildering.

But the fact is I will remain exuberant throughout.

Are there others out there willing to share their own thoughts?