Quotes by recently deceased Kurt Vonnegut (Jr.)
"Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies—God damn it, you've got to be kind."
"What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
"Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'"
"There are plenty of good reasons for fighting, but no good reason ever to hate without reservation, to imagine that God Almighty Himself hates with you, too."
"The arts put man at the center of the universe, whether he belongs there or not. Military science, on the other hand, treats man as garbage and his children, and his cities, too. Military science is probably right about the contemptibility of man in the vastness of the universe. Still, I deny that contemptibility, and I beg you to deny it, through the creation of appreciation of art."
"There is no reason why good cannot triumph as often as evil. The triumph of anything is a matter of organization. If there are such things as angels, I hope that they are organized along the lines of the Mafia."
"Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder, 'Why, why, why?' Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand."
"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."
"Since Alice had never received any religious instruction, and since she had led a blameless life, she never thought of her awful luck as being anything but accidents in a very busy place. Good for her."
"That is my principal objection to life, I think: It's too easy, when alive, to make perfectly horrible mistakes."
"So it goes."
Wednesday, June 20, 2007
Monday, June 18, 2007
The singularity is coming!
Those that read my Skype-tag sometimes ask me what a singularity is.
I usually answer them with the description given by I. J. Good in 1965:
"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
The other meaning is the one often used by astronomers, describing the state at the beginning or end of the universe (usually called "big bang" or "big crunch"), in which things such as "space" and "time" are meaningless.
I recently read "programming the universe" by Seth LLoyd, which describes the process of the universe expanding since the big-bang as a calculation-process. As more and more matter is converted into energy, the calculation of the universe nears the "end-singularity".
This is not new, and many sci-fi writers relate this to the human development, drawing parallels between this expansion of information and that of the human race. I read the Isaac Asimov Story "The last Question" when I was a child, and remember what an impact it made on me as a plausible future for mankind.
We can safely say that if we're lucky, our ultimate destiny as humans and that of the universe are linked. And this is if we're VERY lucky. Because once the first singularity is achieved, nothing can stop hyper-intelligent machines from considering their makers (us) as retarded, superfluous, or a simple "waste of good mass". In the best-case scenario, our creations will take care of us like we take care of our pets, or somehow assimilate us into their beings (as a kind of pet-programs).
Whichever singularity comes first, one will get us in the end.
But the real interesting question is: has this not already happened?
I usually answer them with the description given by I. J. Good in 1965:
"Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind. Thus the first ultraintelligent machine is the last invention that man need ever make."
The other meaning is the one often used by astronomers, describing the state at the beginning or end of the universe (usually called "big bang" or "big crunch"), in which things such as "space" and "time" are meaningless.
I recently read "programming the universe" by Seth LLoyd, which describes the process of the universe expanding since the big-bang as a calculation-process. As more and more matter is converted into energy, the calculation of the universe nears the "end-singularity".
This is not new, and many sci-fi writers relate this to the human development, drawing parallels between this expansion of information and that of the human race. I read the Isaac Asimov Story "The last Question" when I was a child, and remember what an impact it made on me as a plausible future for mankind.
We can safely say that if we're lucky, our ultimate destiny as humans and that of the universe are linked. And this is if we're VERY lucky. Because once the first singularity is achieved, nothing can stop hyper-intelligent machines from considering their makers (us) as retarded, superfluous, or a simple "waste of good mass". In the best-case scenario, our creations will take care of us like we take care of our pets, or somehow assimilate us into their beings (as a kind of pet-programs).
Whichever singularity comes first, one will get us in the end.
But the real interesting question is: has this not already happened?
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