Mercurial > thoughts

     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

     8 

     9 

    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.

    15 

    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.

    27 

    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.
author	Robert McIntyre <rlm@mit.edu>
date	Sun, 21 Apr 2013 03:32:37 +0000
parents	baa6194752f4
children	eae81fa3a8e0