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1 #+title: The Singularity might be Understandable after all.
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2 #+author: Robert McIntyre
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3 #+email: rlm@mit.edu
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4 #+description:
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5 #+keywords:
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6 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
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7 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
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8
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9
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10 People like Ray Kurzeweil think that eventually, it will become
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11 impossible to understand what the entities of the future will be
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12 thinking, and their actions will be inscrutable, since their minds are
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13 so much more complicated than ours. The idea is that the Minds of the
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14 future will be to us as we are to ants.
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15
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16 But if you search through the space of all possible programs with the
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17 goal of coming up with one that describes something in the world, you
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18 will find some common patterns no matter what type of mind you
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19 have. Things like addition, concatentation, recursion, and induction
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20 are all easy and immediate to find, and you will find them almost no
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21 matter what way you search through program-space. In the world of
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22 stories and language, these translate to simple patterns like revenge,
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23 phyrric victory, success, failure, etc. The pricinple of simplicity
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24 must be a driving, universal aesthetic force, since without it Minds
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25 wouldn't be able to manange their own hardware and software, and would
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26 not be able to grow.
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27
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28 So, far in the future, when synthetic life rules the stars, it is
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29 likely that their behavour will still be describable in the simplistic
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30 terms of the human stories of old.
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