My comment isn't about the singularity, but I just saw this movie and wanted to say something because I really enjoyed the film. For me, the most poignant underpinning of the movie isn't about the new complexities of socio-sexual existence, but rather the persistence of social complexities regardless of new technologies. I think the balance between his meat space relationships vs. his OS was exploited with great care and emotion. Really, All this new digital wizardry brings is the same ancient tropes of sex and love with different packaging. I think this realization was displayed so nicely and delicately at the very end. Two people, sitting on a rooftop, and overlooking a city of real people and the magnitude of their complex, difficult, and beautiful lives together.The film attempts to explore the complexity of 21st century socio-sexual existence.
Damn I love following that train to it's logical extreme too. Haven't finished the article yet, but needed to comment on how neat that is.A particularly forward thinking cyborg anthropologist, Amber Case, introduced the idea that humans are in the process of creating social worm holes. Our technology bends time and space to our whim so that we can communicate with anyone, anywhere on the planet… first with our telecommunication infrastructure, and now with the Internet.
It makes so much sense as well. Throughout our evolution (and in fact the evolution of all primates) social communication was directly correlated with our brains processing power. So we could certainly see some correlation in the future with the number of people we can communicate with and our brain's capability. I really liked when Samantha told Theodore that she needed to talk to Alan "post-verbally". Ben Goertzel has actually written a few articles about the potential for post-verbal communication and what that would be like.Damn I love following that train to it's logical extreme too.
Ok, let's take this seriously.* Suppose that AIs are created, and transcend or sublime or whatever, next Tuesday. Are we going to go to work on Wednesday? The world is still here, people are still here, you still need to eat, even if I don't want to eat my cats would still need food, so my guess is, yes, we would. (This assumes that this transcendence would not be like ACC's "Childhood's End.") Unless the transcendees left behind a version of something like "The Galaxy for Untranscended Dummies," I would still be working on asteroids and how to extract material from them. Fast forward 1 million years. The untranscended could have expanded over a good chunk of the galaxy, forming maybe a Kardashev 2.3, 2.4 or even 2.5 civilization. The transcendees would be... where? Somewhere else. Doing what? Who knows. From the million year (much less billion year) perspective, it sure does look history will be written by the untranscended, in which case I suspect the transcendees will not play a large role in it. *The general relativistic in me thinks that the bit about “extreme gravitationally induced time-dilation” is silly, as you can't have enough information density in ordinary matter to do that. Ian Banks talked about civilizations "subliming" into another existence in an internal Kaluza Klein type dimension, which sounds more plausible and will do for now.
Ya, it is possible that the future of intelligence is both transcendence and expansion. I don't see a reason why both can't be possible pathways. However, I think I'm increasingly convinced by transcension hypotheses. What convinces me the most is that it so easily explains Fermi's Paradox, it is consistent with the universes developmental trend towards increased localization, and we see empirical evidence today that we are starting to transition our lives to a digital substrate. I suppose one can find good evidence for the beginnings of expansion as well though. In Her they "moved past matter." And I don't think we know enough about the fabric of reality to say with certainty what's possible with sufficiently advanced technology.The untranscended could have expanded over a good chunk of the galaxy, forming maybe a Kardashev 2.3, 2.4 or even 2.5 civilization.
in ordinary matter to do that