view org/comprehend-singularity.org @ 152:111bd9aa499a

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author Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date Tue, 02 Jun 2015 20:01:35 -0700
parents eae81fa3a8e0
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1 #+title: The Singularity might be Understandable after all.
2 #+author: Robert McIntyre
3 #+email: rlm@mit.edu
4 #+description:
5 #+keywords:
6 #+SETUPFILE: ../../aurellem/org/setup.org
7 #+INCLUDE: ../../aurellem/org/level-0.org
10 People like Ray Kurzeweil think that eventually, it will become
11 impossible to understand what the entities of the future will be
12 thinking, and their actions will be inscrutable, since their minds are
13 so much more complicated than ours. The idea is that the Minds of the
14 future will be to us as we are to ants.
16 But if you search through the space of all possible programs with the
17 goal of coming up with one that describes something in the world, you
18 will find some common patterns no matter what type of mind you
19 have. Things like addition, concatentation, recursion, and induction
20 are all easy and immediate to find, and you will find them almost no
21 matter what way you search through program-space. In the world of
22 stories and language, these translate to simple patterns like revenge,
23 phyrric victory, success, failure, etc. The pricinple of simplicity
24 must be a driving, universal aesthetic force, since without it Minds
25 wouldn't be able to manange their own hardware and software, and would
26 not be able to grow.
28 So, far in the future, when synthetic life rules the stars, it is
29 likely that their behavour will still be describable in the simplistic
30 terms of the human stories of old.