For a minute there I thought I had to get off my couch, when all the while the fact is we don't have to do anything much but keep things afloat for just a few decades more! In fact, we'd best shut up about PO, because if our offspring finds out we knew about it all along, they'll turn and wring our necks come 2036!
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 11:43 am Post subject: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Today, I was listening to The C-Realm Podcast, Episode 92 interview with Michael E. Arth who is the creator of PedestrianVillages.com and who develops less energy-reliant, pedestrian-friendly eco-villages (at least, that's his dream). KMO interviewed him at the recent New Urbanism conference in Austin.
The first part of the conversation talks about our doomed car culture, peak oil and that sort of thing, and it goes into the development of eco-villages. But the conversation later diverges into those techno-utopian realms of thought that are both incredible but interesting. You can go to about the 40 minute mark to pick this up.
I'm picking up this line of thinking from different sources more frequently now. It goes something like: "Even if there is a mass human die-off due to overshoot, increasing energy scarcity and resource depletion - all this will do llittle to slow the advent of the Technological Singularity, which we will be coming upon us very soon and which will fundamentally change everything we have ever known".
The Singularity idea gets bad press here at PeakOil.com, which is unfortunate because there seems to be a whole raft of Kunstler-esque thinkers out there who take it much more seriously - and you can tell that Michael Arth is repeating some of the ideas that are circulating amongst this group. Probably a whole crew of them assembled at the New Urbanist Conference where Kunstler gave an opening address. I wish a poster or two on PO.com had attended that conference and reviewed it for us or at least had provided some impressions of it.
The difference between these Peak Oil aware people and the crowd at PO.com, is that here on this site, there is no future - or it is a drastically curtailed one - PERIOD!; this other group talks about Gaia's present tribulations as sort of like a caterpillar, in which human beings and their pusuits (comprising the intellectually aware information envelope of life on Earth) are gearing up for a fundamental transformation. We will wrap ourselves in the chrysalis of our technology before fundamentally changing, perhaps wrenchingly, into something altogether new. Glimpses of this new reality will be hard for we, in our ordinary "burger stand awareness", to grasp in its immensity.
I have to say that the idea of a mass die-off coupled with the advent of recursive artificial intelligence expanding exponentially towards a singularity is vastly interesting! But it mostly just attracts a lot of snarky comments here on PO.
...However, that smarter minds are harder to discuss than faster brains or bigger brains does not show that smarter minds are harder to build – deeper to ponder, certainly, but not necessarily more intractable as a problem. It may even be that genuine increases in smartness could be achieved just by adding more computing power to the existing human brain – although this is not currently known. What is known is that going from primates to humans did not require exponential increases in brain size or thousandfold improvements in processing speeds. Relative to chimps, humans have threefold larger brains, sixfold larger prefrontal areas, and 98. 4% similar DNA; given that the human genome has 3 billion base pairs, this implies that at most twelve million bytes of extra "software" transforms chimps into humans. And there is no suggestion in our evolutionary history that evolution found it more and more difficult to construct smarter and smarter brains; if anything, hominid evolution has appeared to speed up over time, with shorter intervals between larger developments.
But leave aside for the moment the question of how to build smarter minds, and ask what "smarter-than-human" really means. And as the basic definition of the Singularity points out, this is exactly the point at which our ability to extrapolate breaks down. We don't know because we're not that smart. We're trying to guess what it is to be a better-than-human guesser. Could a gathering of apes have predicted the rise of human intelligence, or understood it if it were explained? For that matter, could the 15th century have predicted the 20th century, let alone the 21st? Nothing has changed in the human brain since the 15th century; if the people of the 15th century could not predict five centuries ahead across constant minds, what makes us think we can outguess genuinely smarter-than-human intelligence?...
Last edited by Schadenfreude on Thu May 01, 2008 12:20 pm; edited 1 time in total
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 12:16 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Schadenfreude wrote:
Today, I was listening to The C-Realm Podcast, Episode 92 interview with Michael E. Arth who is the creator of PedestrianVillages.com and who develops less energy-reliant, pedestrian-friendly eco-villages (at least, that's his dream). KMO interviewed him at the recent New Urbanism conference in Austin.
The first part of the conversation talks about our doomed car culture, peak oil and that sort of thing, and it goes into the development of eco-villages. But the conversation later diverges into those techno-utopian realms of thought that are both incredible but interesting. You can go to about the 40 minute mark to pick this up.
I'm picking up this line of thinking from different sources more frequently now. It goes something like: "Even if there is a mass human die-off due to overshoot, increasing energy scarcity and resource depletion - all this will do llittle to slow the advent of the Technological Singularity, which we will be coming upon us very soon and which will fundamentally change everything we have ever known".
The Singularity idea gets bad press here at PeakOil.com, which is unfortunate because there seems to be a whole raft of Kunstler-esque thinkers out there who take it much more seriously - and you can tell that Michael Arth is repeating some of the ideas that are circulating amongst this group. Probably a whole crew of them assembled at the New Urbanist Conference where Kunstler gave an opening address. I wish a poster or two on PO.com had attended that conference and reviewed it for us or at least had provided some impressions of it.
The difference between these Peak Oil aware people and the crowd at PO.com, is that here on this site, there is no future - or it is a drastically curtailed one - PERIOD!; this other group talks about Gaia's present tribulations as sort of like a caterpillar, in which human beings and their pusuits (comprising the intellectually aware information envelope of life on Earth) are gearing up for a fundamental transformation. We will wrap ourselves in the chrysalis of our technology before fundamentally changing, perhaps wrenchingly, into something altogether new. Glimpses of this new reality will be hard for we, in our ordinary "burger stand awareness", to grasp in its immensity.
I have to say that the idea of a mass die-off coupled with the advent of recursive artificial intelligence expanding exponentially towards a singularity is vastly interesting! But it mostly just attracts a lot of snarky comments here on PO.
A science fiction story you may enjoy that discusses such issues is Smile On The Void by Stuart Gordan written back in the early eighties. It has an evolutionary and universal view of a singularity occurrence along with an interesting set of characters. The book should be easy to find at any large city library or on Amazon I would imagine.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 12:33 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Milret2 wrote:
A science fiction story you may enjoy that discusses such issues is Smile On The Void by Stuart Gordan written back in the early eighties. It has an evolutionary and universal view of a singularity occurrence along with an interesting set of characters. The book should be easy to find at any large city library or on Amazon I would imagine.
It was Vernor Vinge, another science fiction writer, who first coined the term "Singularity" and described it back in the early 80's, I believe. I haven't read any of te science fiction that originated or explored the idea.
But it seems to be gathering momentum beyond mere science fiction nowadays. A lot of scientists and philosophers seem to be jumping on-board this admittedly still-fringeish idea. Of course, I think the jamming together of peak oil/resource depletion thought together with Singularitarian thought is hugely interesting.
When it comes to the future, I agree mostly with Yogi Berra: "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future". But you can sure speculate about it!
No one knows how the future will unfold - and it always seems to surprise everyone. The Doomers on this board irk me because they seem to proclaim their complete certainty about what is going to occur. Nothing about the future is certain.
We can do better. The future doesn't have to be the dystopia promised by doomsayers. The future doesn't even have to be the flashy yet unimaginative chrome-and-computer world of traditional futurism. We can become smarter. We can step beyond the millennia-old messes created by human-level intelligence. Humanity can solve its problems – both the huge visible problems everyone talks about and the huge silent problems we've learned to take for granted. If the nature of the world we live in bothers you, there is something rational you can do about it. We can do better with your support.
Don't be a bystander at the Singularity. You can direct your effort at the point of greatest impact – the beginning.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 12:53 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
What fascinates me are the archetechtural (sp?) similarities between:
"The Rapture" & "The Millenium" as promised by some Christians
"The Great Awakening" as promised by David Korten
"The Singularity" as promised by Ray Kurzweil
What is about our culture where people have to have some absolutely ridiculous and patently unworkable future to look forward to? Perhaps the idea of progress is so embedded within our psychologies that the clear evidence we will be going
"backwards" is simply firewalled off at all costs.
People are not going to be "envelping themselves within their technologies" when they can't pay for food or fuel. Which 2 billion and growing already can't. _________________ http://www.peakoil.org
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 1:11 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
MattSavinar wrote:
What fascinates me are the archetechtural (sp?) similarities between:
"The Rapture" & "The Millenium" as promised by some Christians
"The Great Awakening" as promised by David Korten
"The Singularity" as promised by Ray Kurzweil
What is about our culture where people have to have some absolutely ridiculous and patently unworkable future to look forward to? Perhaps the idea of progress is so embedded within our psychologies that the clear evidence we will be going
"backwards" is simply firewalled off at all costs.
People are not going to be "envelping themselves within their technologies" when they can't pay for food or fuel. Which 2 billion and growing already can't.
It's "archetypal", bozo.
Well, as I said at the get-go, there are a number of active, peak oil aware people out there who are discussing both ideas: a die-off due to overpopulation/resource depletion and an unstoppable progression forward to greater-than-human intelligence.
What's your envisioned future, Matt? The pre-Beverly Beverly Hillbillies?
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 2:37 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Schadenfreude wrote:
It's "archetypal", bozo.
Schadenfreude,
Thanks for responding!
Actually, I was referring to the construction/blueprints of the various ideas. (As in how an architect would devise them.) But I can see where you would think I meant "archetypal"
Even the idea that both a descent into total destitution and a dieoff existing at the same time as an ascent into "greater than human intelligence" is structurally similar to ideas like "The Rapture." In that scenario, most people get sent to hell where they get sliced and diced and spiritually killed. But a few will become part of God's kingdom in heaven. That's pretty similar to the idea that most will end up in a post peak oil hell on earth while a few will become part of the "Singularity."
My guess is most or many of the people who subscribe to this idea have a lot in common with those who subscribe to the raptue idea in that they assumme (naturally, of course) they're going to be the ones going to heaven or becoming part of the singularity or whatever superhuman "reward" they fell they're in store for. _________________ http://www.peakoil.org
Joined: Nov 08, 2005 Posts: 258 Location: The Maple State
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:17 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
After denial and anger comes bargaining.
I see most 2012 memes as part of this 'singularity' thinking.
Quote:
Maybe all this War on Terror business and getting control of resources is, at its root, the psychopath's way of handling a threat to their survival. Maybe it isn't the "Twilight of the Psychopaths" as Kevin Barrett might like to think... but the Twilight of Humanity; if we don't wake up.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:22 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
MattSavinar wrote:
Schadenfreude wrote:
It's "archetypal", bozo.
Schadenfreude,
Thanks for responding!
Actually, I was referring to the construction/blueprints of the various ideas. (As in how an architect would devise them.) But I can see where you would think I meant "archetypal"...
Oh sure, I find that explanation very believable...
Matt Savinar wrote:
What fascinates me are the archetechtural (sp?) similarities between:
"The Rapture" & "The Millenium" as promised by some Christians
"The Great Awakening" as promised by David Korten
"The Singularity" as promised by Ray Kurzweil
Yes, those things have a lot to do with "architecture".
But, it's true, the idea of The Singularity has been satirized as "The Rapture for Nerds" which I find amusing too. But it doesn't stop me from being aware of the dramatic momentum of Scientific/Technological Progress that we are still seeing. It's often mind-blowing! There is absolutely NO sign of Scientific Progress' eminent decline.
Along with PO.com's little icon, I keep Wired Science, Science Daily and Ray Kurzweil's RSS feed on my links bar to read over the science news articles posted there. Amongst the more ordinary titles of articles, are some truly stunning ones. Many of them have to do with energy. If you read them for a while, you soon realize that there is simply no accurately predicting the future - which is what Doomsaying is.
If peak oil theory will eventually win the day, then at some point, we should expect to see a serious diminishing of new developments in science and technology. But before then, it seems to me that as the price of oil continues to rise, this will spur an intense bust of innovation such as we've never seen before - something like on the order of the development that took place during WWII - except even bigger and badder and worldwide.
We are nowhere near seeing any sort of drop-off in scientific or technological innovation.
I'm especially interested in Kurzweil's suggestion that scientists should take nanometrical slices of the human brain and create an ultra-detailed 3D picture of the brain's neurological design. Science should then analyze the brains basic design and functioning (if possible) and mimic the inherent algorithms within it to duplicate the structure in silcon. This task looks quite reasonable for present capabilities.
If scientists were to be successful in duplicating the brain's ultra-parallel, non-software bound, capabilities, then watch out because The Singularity will be upon our doorstep.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:23 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
MattSavinar writes >>>Even the idea that both a descent into total destitution and a dieoff existing at the same time as an ascent into "greater than human intelligence" is structurally similar to ideas like "The Rapture." In that scenario, most people get sent to hell where they get sliced and diced and spiritually killed. But a few will become part of God's kingdom in heaven. That's pretty similar to the idea that most will end up in a post peak oil hell on earth while a few will become part of the "Singularity." <<<
I like the analogy. I am an eternal optimist who also is quite intrigued with such things as climate change, natural resource depletion, population explosion, and the general ability of a lot of humanity to not be very humane all to often. My wife, who tends towards optimism, can not understand my own personal optimism while I have interest in such things ... heck .. I am not sure I can either . I have no concrete basis for optimism (I do not think that there is a way for either I alone or civilization in general to have an effective answer to the really astonishing problems our planet is faced with) but ... I am not slitting my wrists, disposing of my assets in a wild party, or taking steps to secure my bunker. I do not even have a bunker javascript:emoticon('').
I suppose part of why I have lurked around these boards for several years is to try to see how others dealt with such things.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:42 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Schadenfreude wrote:
.
We are nowhere near seeing any sort of drop-off in scientific or technological innovation.
Reality begs to differ. If you look at things like:
1) health care available per dollar
2) transport speed available per dollar
3) level of education available per dollar
4) number of patents per dollar of R/D
. . . And so forth, then we peaked in tech development a long time ago.
Even the net was developed way back in the 1960s. And 95% of it today is used for porn. So I can't say even the net is really a shining example of technological innovation.
You should read these articles, particularly the first. A Pentagon physicist did a very thorough study that shows tech innovation peaked a long time ago. Most of the recent developments either:
A) don't contribute very much to human well-being or
B) are glorified distractions (IPODs and such) or
C) so expensive they may as well not exist as they are beyond the reach of all but maybe 1/10th of 1% of the world's population:
And Kurzweil is the same guy who downs 250 pills a day as it's part of his plan to live forever and turn into a space-faring cyborg. So citing him as an authority on anything is a tad silly. _________________ http://www.peakoil.org
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:47 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
Milret2 wrote:
MattSavinar writes >>>Even the idea that both a descent into total destitution and a dieoff existing at the same time as an ascent into "greater than human intelligence" is structurally similar to ideas like "The Rapture." In that scenario, most people get sent to hell where they get sliced and diced and spiritually killed. But a few will become part of God's kingdom in heaven. That's pretty similar to the idea that most will end up in a post peak oil hell on earth while a few will become part of the "Singularity." <<<
I like the analogy. I am an eternal optimist who also is quite intrigued with such things as climate change, natural resource depletion, population explosion, and the general ability of a lot of humanity to not be very humane all to often. My wife, who tends towards optimism, can not understand my own personal optimism while I have interest in such things ... heck .. I am not sure I can either . I have no concrete basis for optimism (I do not think that there is a way for either I alone or civilization in general to have an effective answer to the really astonishing problems our planet is faced with) but ... I am not slitting my wrists, disposing of my assets in a wild party, or taking steps to secure my bunker. I do not even have a bunker javascript:emoticon('').
I suppose part of why I have lurked around these boards for several years is to try to see how others dealt with such things.
The notion of optimism is so entrenched within our modern culture that people mistake "optimism" and "good humor" or being of a pleasant disposition for the same thing. You can be off-the-charts pessimistic but still be an affiable and fun person to be around.
Put another way, you don't need to be optimistic to be a lot of fun to be around. You can be quite good-humored and pleasant even as you think the vast majority of us, yourself included, have 1-way tickets to the post Peak Oil meat grinder.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 3:51 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
MattSavinar wrote:
..My guess is most or many of the people who subscribe to this idea have a lot in common with those who subscribe to the raptue idea in that they assumme (naturally, of course) they're going to be the ones going to heaven or becoming part of the singularity or whatever superhuman "reward" they fell they're in store for.
That's just a bunch of bullshit. I mean, the human brain exists, right?
Our technology is approaching the point at which we will be able to understand how the human brain creates "consciousness" or, more minimally, manipulates "intellectual concepts".
The technology for manipulating concepts and producing consciousness already exists, so it's not a question of BELIEF at all! The question is: How soon will science be able to understand and duplicate the brain's workings?
I would bet that machine consciousness is not very far beyond current human grasp - a couple of decades is my guess. And once that happens, watch out! Because when you duplicate the abysmally slow architecture of the brain in nanometer-sized transistors and silicon, then you have created something tremendously more intelligent than the most intelligent human being! And you have a system that will search out, understand, associate, manipulate concepts and invent.
This should be no more surprising to people than the advent of machines that can do more physical work than animals. It's bound to happen. So Matt Savinar's characterization of this as a "belief system" is just farking stupid.
Milret2 wrote:
I like the analogy. I am an eternal optimist who also is quite intrigued with such things as climate change, natural resource depletion, population explosion, and the general ability of a lot of humanity to not be very humane all to often. My wife, who tends towards optimism, can not understand my own personal optimism while I have interest in such things ... heck .. I am not sure I can either . I have no concrete basis for optimism (I do not think that there is a way for either I alone or civilization in general to have an effective answer to the really astonishing problems our planet is faced with)
I don't think this has anything to do with optimism or pessimism at all. It's just looking at what's going on in the world. There's a tremendous technological boom occurring while at the same time there is growing awareness that the Earth's resources will not be able to sustain a 9 billion person population. Humanities numbers are destroying Earth's ecosystems.
So what will happen as we observe these two trends occurring side-by-side?
It's interesting as hell, isn't it?
I've a few ideas of my own about what will go down. But, you know, we're talking about the future - a place where 99.99% of all guesses about it are proven wrong.
Posted: Thu May 01, 2008 4:04 pm Post subject: Re: Peak Oil, The Die-Off And The Technological Singularity
MattSavinar wrote:
If you look at things like:
1) health care available per dollar
2) transport speed available per dollar
3) level of education available per dollar
4) number of patents per dollar of R/D
. . . And so forth, then we peaked in tech development a long time ago.
That's bullshit. Tell it to people like Craig Ventner.
I think I need to re-iterate the original thought behind this thread: That is, a group of active, peak oil aware people have been suggesting a simultaneous population reduction along with a trend of increasing technology which is moving us closer to what has been termed "The Singularity" - the point at which machine intelligence is smarter than the smartest human being. When true machine intelligence occurs, these machines will begin designing the next generation of intelligent machines and so on and so on... Knowledge would expand exponentially vaster than we can possibly imagine.
We could see a human die-off along side of this transformational development. I, Schadenfreude, am not the originator of these ideas; they are coming from people who attended and were interviewed at the recent New Urbanism Conference. This idea is circulating around in groups of people who are aware of peak oil and its ramifications.
A Pentagon physicist did a very thorough study that shows tech innovation peaked a long time ago.
Doesn't he say there will be no more innovation by the year 2024? It's worth noting that in the US most of the people we hire for R&D (especially for engineering) are either from India or China. US society likes it's technology, but not the science that makes the technology possible.
Quote:
1) health care available per dollar
2) transport speed available per dollar
3) level of education available per dollar
4) number of patents per dollar of R/D
1-3 are all economics & policy related issues. As for #4, can you give a more specific statistic (adjusted for inflation)?
Quote:
A) don't contribute very much to human well-being or
B) are glorified distractions (IPODs and such) or
C) so expensive they may as well not exist as they are beyond the reach of all but maybe 1/10th of 1% of the world's population:
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