[Sixstrings]

Trailer:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntY01qoIdus

In Transcendent Man, Ptolemy follows Kurzweil around the globe as he presents the daring arguments from his best-selling book, The Singularity is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Kurzweil predicts that with the ever-accelerating rate of technological change, humanity is fast approaching an era in which our intelligence will become increasingly non-biological and millions of times more powerful. This will be the dawning of a new civilization enabling us to transcend our biological limitations. In Kurzweil's post-biological world, boundaries blur between human and machine, real and virtual. Human aging and illness are reversed, world hunger and poverty are solved, and we cure death.

Ptolemy explores the social and philosophical implications of these changes and the potential threats they pose to human civilization in dialogues with world leader Colin Powell; technologists Hugo deGaris, Peter Diamandis, Kevin Warwick, and Dean Kamen; journalist Kevin Kelly; actor William Shatner; and musician Stevie Wonder. Kurzweil maintains a radically optimistic view of the future, while acknowledging new dangers.
http://transcendentman.com/

Well I haven't seen this, it's in limited release.

This Singularity stuff is in the news lately.. was watching MSNBC and Raitgan had a segment on this movie, now Chris Matthews is talking about the Jeopardy-winning Watson computer.

At the same time, we have all the doom issues bubbling to the surface -- peak oil going mainstream, climate change of course, the middle east is in turmoil, heck even Wisconsin is in turmoil. What I find interesting is how hopeful the futurist vision is, but I can't see how that fits with all the bad stuff going down right now.

Can the two visions of the future co-exist? Can we at the same time have peak oil / climate chaos / collapse of capitialism all going on and yet still develop sentient robots and nano-bots in our bloodstream plus our brains hooked up to the internet and maybe even flying Jetsons cars too?

And ok, let's assume we get the Singularity God supercomputer billions of times smarter than us.. what's it gonna do about our fresh water issues, we're running out of that. There's no app for food and water, after all.

[steam_cannon]

Can the two visions of the future co-exist? Can we at the same time have peak oil / climate chaos / collapse of capitalism all going on and yet still develop sentient robots and nano-bots in our bloodstream plus our brains hooked up...

You ever see bladerunner?



Speaking of blade runner, another good movie is The Thirteenth Floor. It's basically a "what if the singularity happened" and we didn't know it AKA The Simulation Argument. The Simulation Argument is interesting in that it suggests that the singularity might have already happened long ago and this is all just a digital physics game world. Also that would make for an amusing explanation for the double slit experiment. Ha, ha. Anyway, if the simulation argument were correct then the singularity already happened and we are all living in a SimCity like world only it's bigger and we're the sims. Though I think The Simulation Argument has about the same likelyhood of being right as Kurtzweil.

[Beery]

Has anyone read 'Feed' by M.T. Anderson. It presents a realistic view of what a 'brain hooked up to a futuristic internet' would look like. It ain't pretty.

[peripato]

As I've said before, in relation to the singularity hypothesis, that the only thing increasing exponentially today is human stupidity and that rather than technology transcending biology, it will be nature that transcends us, in the form of dieoff.

[Sixstrings]

You ever see bladerunner?

Yup, good movie too. I'm a sucker for a good dystopia.

But since becoming peak oil aware, I realize how dependent everything is on the supply chain. High tech gadgetry is at the top of a big pyramid.. seems to me you can't have your iPhones and iPads and neuro singularity implants without everything else being in place, the boring stuff like food to eat and cheap oil at the bottom of the pyramid.

BUT am I wrong? Is a type of world Techno Poverty possible? We see this now, with even tribal Africans having cell phones and internet access. And probably much of the world could be a mess, but if even just a few leading economies are out there then that might enough to continue tech advance.

So.. is Blade Runner possible without cheap oil, or is it going to be a World Made by Hand, that's the question.

[mos6507]

It's merely a matter of the gulf between the haves and the have nots. Today it's the difference between a first worlder and a starving ethiopian. Tomorrow it may be a select few people living to 200 having their organ replacements grown in vats and all that other Brave New World stuff and, you guessed it--- starving ethiopians.

Seems like there will always be some people at the very bottom rung of the ladder, no matter what the technocopians think.

[ritter]

I'm not convinced that the whole "cure death" thing is a good idea.

[Carlhole]

What I find interesting is how hopeful the futurist vision is, but I can't see how that fits with all the bad stuff going down right now.

(1) You cannot ever expect to reliably predict the future; all you can do is look at current trends.
(2) One can perceive a trend in peak oil, declining resources, eco-system destruction, de-speciation, over-population, etc.
(3) One can perceive a trend in accelerating science and technology
(4) If you extrapolate the first trend out into the future, you see doom
(5) If you extrapolate the second trend out into the future you see something like The Singularity and the end of humanity as we know it.
(6) To believe in either one completely is ridiculous since you can never reliably predict the future. The world is simply way too chaotic a place.
(7) These seemingly counter-poised trends are related by population growth. As population density increases, science and technology increase, slowly at first but with increasing momentum. As population increases, strains on the environment also occur, causing problems which, in turn, are met by humans with, you guessed it, science and technology.
(8) The exponential nature of increasing SciTech is due to this accruing scientific achievement which becomes recursive on itself in a number of fascinating ways. Science leads to better tools and knowledge, which leads to more scientific exploration, which yields better tools, questions, knowledge, ad infinitum.
(9) If you completely believe in peak oil-style doom, then you MUST make a prediction as to when science and technology will peak and begin a decline. So far, it's doing nothing of the sort. Science is racing forward. We are living in scientific boom times. It's so obvious.
(10) No one on this site has ever made a serious assertion that Science has peaked or will peak soon. They can't.



This logarithmic chart illustrates the long haul of evolution. "Key Events" are those related to greater information processing - such as development of language, cooperation, etc. Hominids are obviously part of this long haul evolution as are modern humans. The long trend of evolution continues today in the form of human science & technology.

You can't have an Olduvai Gorge if Science continues to race ahead. No one has answered my years-long question: "If our imminent doom is assured, when will we see Peak Science?" Because there is sure no indication whatsoever that science is peaking in any way. In a crisis, the acceleration of sci/tech only increases.

[americandream]

This is how ponzi schemes flourish. And there is no shortage of dimwits who would rather buy snake oil than use reason.

No matter what sort of singularity device the scheme managers concoct, we haven't moved past using fire to energise the scheme. A scheme which invariably involves selling as much obsolete junk to as many numbskulls as we can con.

[Carlhole]

Charlie Rose to interview Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy about Transcendent Man film on March 3

Charlie Rose will interview Ray Kurzweil and Barry Ptolemy about the movie Transcendent Man and its themes March 3, 2011 (Thursday) on PBS (60 minutes). The interview will re-air March 4, 2011 (Friday) on Bloomberg Television.

[Sixstrings]

No one has answered my years-long question: "If our imminent doom is assured, when will we see Peak Science?" Because there is sure no indication whatsoever that science is peaking in any way. In a crisis, the acceleration of sci/tech only increases.

Not always. If things get really bad, progress grinds to a standstill.. like North Korea, where they're still dressing like it's 1959.

Maybe I'm wrong here, but I see high tech as being at the top of the BAU supply chain pyramid. A lot of crap goes into making one iPad. You have the rare earth metals, plastics of course, and then all the human engineering behind it -- every aspect of its construction is at the top of the supply chain, it seems to me. And it's global too.. the engineers are in California, the factories and rare earths in China. Other components come from around the world. And Apple couldn't even exist without a functioning stock market providing investment capital, and stable consumer economies with enough people who can afford these products.

So if globalism collapses and the 3,000 caesar salads with it, then how can high tech continue? We're not talking about stuff that can be made by the village blacksmith here.. a LOT of inputs involved with high tech.

EDIT: and another thing.. Western civilization collapsed once before. All the advanced knowledge and tech of the Romans was lost as they collapsed into the Dark Ages. Latter generations looked at those aqueducts and marveled at how they were built. People forgot how to build good roads, much less hydro powered grain milling factories. Philosophy and the humanities were lost, though rediscovered in the Renaissance.

So my point is that tech isn't self-sustaining.. it *requires* a complex and functioning supply chain of value-added resources and highly specialized human labor.

[americandream]

High tech alone will not redeem capitalism which is notoriously destructive the further it is scaled out. We simply cannot clean up a system which revolves around selling as many plastic ducks in a year as it can, and to hell with the ones that have to be dumped to make way for the next generation of ducky.

[vision-master]

I'm telling ya, just around the corner will be an energy source that will change the entire World. TPTB will be TPTwuz. We are living in the dark ages right now, so many things have been surpressed from us plebs. Take outer space for example, Nasa knows a bunch more than they are telling the sheeple, they don't want to upset the church and it's power ya know.

[timmac]

High tech alone will not redeem capitalism which is notoriously destructive the further it is scaled out. We simply cannot clean up a system which revolves around selling as many plastic ducks in a year as it can, and to hell with the ones that have to be dumped to make way for the next generation of ducky.

Can you even post once on this forum and not dish Capitalism, or are you just program for this kind of responce..

[americandream]

High tech alone will not redeem capitalism which is notoriously destructive the further it is scaled out. We simply cannot clean up a system which revolves around selling as many plastic ducks in a year as it can, and to hell with the ones that have to be dumped to make way for the next generation of ducky.

Can you even post once on this forum and not dish Capitalism, or are you just program for this kind of responce..

Coming from you and your recent antics pmming me, I would suggest you get some help for your aggression.

[timmac]

High tech alone will not redeem capitalism which is notoriously destructive the further it is scaled out. We simply cannot clean up a system which revolves around selling as many plastic ducks in a year as it can, and to hell with the ones that have to be dumped to make way for the next generation of ducky.

Can you even post once on this forum and not dish Capitalism, or are you just program for this kind of responce..

Coming from you and your recent antics pmming me, I would suggest you get some help for your aggression.

Well thats just the McCarthy in me, you do know his famous statement, the only good commie is a _____ commie.

[Sixstrings]

High tech alone will not redeem capitalism which is notoriously destructive the further it is scaled out. We simply cannot clean up a system which revolves around selling as many plastic ducks in a year as it can, and to hell with the ones that have to be dumped to make way for the next generation of ducky.

Can you even post once on this forum and not dish Capitalism, or are you just program for this kind of responce..

He has a point. The future of globalist Western capitalism as we've known it is in question at the moment. Not saying it has to collapse, but something will have to go down.. like a new world currency, or oil / resource backed currencies. We're at the point where new debt isn't creating new money, and that has to crash there's no other outcome.

As for the singularity, that would be the deathknell of capitalism. We've talked about it before in other threads.. in short, there will *have* to be a new kind of communism because the majority of jobs will be automated. Consumer capitalism can't sustain itself without consumers who get paid for doing jobs, without jobs we'd have no money to buy the Stuff.

Even something like day trading or investment banking.. today's automated millisecond high frequency algorithms are ALREADY dominating the market. So what will that be like after the singularity? Or forget the singularity, just consider how sharp these algorithms will be in twenty years. No human trader will be able to compete with that -- and if too many people have access to perfected computer trading, the market will be unsustainable.

[Dezakin]

As for the singularity, that would be the deathknell of capitalism. We've talked about it before in other threads.. in short, there will *have* to be a new kind of communism because the majority of jobs will be automated. Consumer capitalism can't sustain itself without consumers who get paid for doing jobs, without jobs we'd have no money to buy the Stuff.

I'll worry about that after automated work generates enough capital to finance our entitlement programs. When that happens you'll just see larger and larger entitlement programs I imagine, until work becomes largely recreational or the province of the few high demand jobs that can't be done by machines yet (entertainment, hookers, etcetera)

Even something like day trading or investment banking.. today's automated millisecond high frequency algorithms are ALREADY dominating the market. So what will that be like after the singularity? Or forget the singularity, just consider how sharp these algorithms will be in twenty years. No human trader will be able to compete with that -- and if too many people have access to perfected computer trading, the market will be unsustainable.

How do you get from more efficient markets to unsustainable markets? So human traders won't be able to exploit market arbitrage, big deal.

[mos6507]

I'll worry about that after automated work generates enough capital to finance our entitlement programs. When that happens you'll just see larger and larger entitlement programs I imagine, until work becomes largely recreational or the province of the few high demand jobs that can't be done by machines yet (entertainment, hookers, etcetera)

You WORRY about that? I'll take your worries over mine, thank you very much.