The singularity is a poorly constructed myth. It is built around the presumption that intelligence is a linear function of CPU power, and that surely as CPU power rises, so shall intelligence; the problem is, that prediction was made in the 1970s, since which CPU power has risen ten decimal orders of magnitude, and we still don't have much better speech recognition than we did back then, let alone anything even approaching simple reasoning.
The ability to detect faces is not a signal that general intelligence is right around the corner.
Well, maybe. There are a whole lot of very different things called "The Singularity" and some of them are much more reasonable than others.
There's the Cambpellian Singularity, which says that we won't be able to predict what will happen next. Pretty non-controversial as far as it goes.
There's the Vingean Singularity, which says that if we ever develop AIs that can think as fast and as well as humans then due to Moore's Law they'll be thinking twice as fast as humans after 2 years, so they'll start designing chips and the period of Moore's law will fall to 1 year, and so on with us reaching infinite computing power in finite time. I think this vision is flawed.
Relatedly, there's the Intelligence Explosion Singularity (associated with Yudkowsky), which says that as soon as its AIs designing AIs, smarter AIs will relativly quickly be able to make even smarter AIs and we'll get a "fwoosh" effect, though not to infinity in finite time. I find this unlikely, but can't rule it out.
There's one I don't have a handy name for, but lets call it the AI Revolution viewpoint, which is that AIs will cause civilization to switch to a faster mode of progress, just like the Agricultural Revolution and Industrial Revolution did. This one will only look like a singularity in hindsight, and might seem gradual to the people living through it. I think this one is pretty credible.
There's the Kurzweilian Singularity, where thanks to Accelerating Change we'll someday pass a point which will arbitrarily be called the Singularity. As far as I can tell this is Kurzweil appropriating the hot word of the moment for his ideas a la Javascript.
Then there's the Naive Singularity, which equates processing power with intelligence and then concludes that computers must be getting smarter. This is indeed totally naive and not something we should worry about. I guess the linked paper is evidence that you can substitute a faster computer for smarter AI researchers to some extent, but probably not a very large one.
Your characterization of Vinge's singularity is incorrect. I have never read anything in which he brings up infinity, I.J. Good does though. Vinge's is actually more like your AI revolution except that it will be evident as a singularity only to those looking forward and not to those looking backwards. So instead of using agriculture/industrial divide as an analogy he posits a human/animal divide.
As his definition of singularity is pretty strongly tied to comprehension think of it like this - the singularity is the time point after which a 10 year old unmodified human child from 1000 AD can not grow up to understand his or her surroundings.
I could have sworn that that argument came from a short piece of non-fiction Vinge wrote which was my first exposure to the whole idea, but I might be mis-remembering because it was a long time ago. Or, given that this was a long time ago, he might have changed his viewpoint.
"There are a whole lot of very different things called "The Singularity" "
If the singularity was a legitimate concept with anything approaching experimental evidence, then this could not be true. This observation of yours - with which I agree - suggests to me that The Singularity needs a pope hat.
It is instructive to notice that all of "the singularities" are the products of science fiction authors, and in the case of the original, a particularly bad one.
There is a delightful level of schadenfreude involved in observing the multiplicity of "The Singularities." In two different ways its name says "there's only one," and yet they still can't agree on topics that are critical and fundamental to the concept itself, like the definition of intelligence, or whether or not to circumcise.
Vinge is a retired math professor, I.J. Good was an accomplished mathematician, Kurzweil makes hard to swallow predictions but is still an accomplished technologist and I happen to very much enjoy Vinge's writing. Regardless, the idea is worth considering independent of who is saying it.
I am also sure you know that words - such as variety and polymorphism - have different context specific meanings. Singularity in this case as in the kind of thing you can find on a variety but not on a manifold.
The idea of infinite recursive Moore's law fueled intelligence explosions leading to super human intellects by 2030 is something I assign a low probability to. I don't find it hard to believe that there is some point in the future - say 2131 - such that if anyone alive today or previously were transported there, they would never be able to understand what was going on and everyone from that time would think circles around them.
Maybe you didn't realize this, but the science fiction author bit wasn't meant as a slander. Many high quality people, and also Kurtzweil, are science fiction authors.
What I was getting at was "you realize they're writing books to make people happy for money, not doing legitimate science on that day, right?"
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"words - such as variety and polymorphism - have different context specific meanings."
Sure. All handwaving about the rules of language notwithstanding, though, none of The Singularities have merit or underlying measurement, even if you want to talk syntax and grammar to create a seeming of academia by proxy.
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"The idea of infinite recursive Moore's law"
... is nonsense. What would "recursion" be in the context of Moore's law? Have you even thought this over?
What, Moore's Law solves itself by going deeper into itself until the datastructure is exhausted?
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"fueled intelligence explosions"
The science fiction part. I mean, you might as well say "fuelled by warp drives," because there's no evidence they're going to happen either. Or unicorns.
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"is something I assign a low probability to."
This suggests that you don't know what probabilities are. Probabilities are either frequentist, which cannot happen here because we have no knowledge of the rates here (this would be like calculating the frequentist probability of alien life - it's just making numbers up,) or Bayesian, where you draw probabilities from observed events, at which point the probability is exactly zero.
So, is it undefined or zero that you're promoting?
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"I don't find it hard to believe that there is some point in the future - say 2131"
(rolls eyes)
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"they would never be able to understand what was going on and everyone from that time would think circles around them."
It seems you don't even need to be transported into the future for that.
"2.) Singularity as in breakdown not as in single. You purposely muddled the meaning to make your quip work."
This is a blatant falsehood. I have solely and exclusively used it as a title for Kurtzweil's concept. It has no meaning; it's a name. I have muddled nothing. It is inappropriate for you to make accusations like this without evidence.
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"3.) Moore's law fueled as in AI gets interest on their intelligence"
Yes, that's what I said at the outset: this whole thing is driven by the false belief that intelligence is a function of CPU time. There is no experimental evidence in history to support this, and there are 65 years of counter-examples.
Repeating it won't make it less wrong.
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"Recursive as in AI makes smarter AI makes smarter AI..."
Oh.
This gets to a different false presumption, namely that the ability to create an intelligence, as well as that the power of the intelligence created, is a linear function of the prior intelligence.
This whole treating everything like it's a score, like it's a number you tweak upwards? It's crap.
You can't make an AI with an IQ of 106 just because you have a 104, and the guy who made the 104 had a 102.
This is numerology, not computer science.
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"4.) Science fiction or not i find it unlikely."
I can't even tell what noun you're attached to, at this point. What do you find unlikely?
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"5.) Bayesian. Look up prior."
What about bayesian, sir? I don't need to look up prior; I used it, correctly, in what I said to you. You're just telling me to look things up to pretend that there is an error there, so that you can take the position of being correct without actually having done the work.
There are zero priors of alien life, sir. That was my point, in bringing up what you're now blandly one-word repeating at me, in your effort to gin up a falsehood where none actually exists.
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"7.) Thanks ;) You actually never address my main point though."
You don't appear to have one.
Maybe you've forgotten that you were replying to someone else, who already said that to you?
They mostly don't have the philosophical or synthetic chops to make intelligent statements about the singularity. Moore misunderstood his own observation for at least the first ten years after he made it, not to minimize his important contributions.
Singularity is an unfortunate term, because it's technically incorrect and logically contradictory. My work is not trying to make a singularity; it is trying to make recursively self-improving machine-human intelligence which interacts with and learns from its environment. This is not impossible; it is merely technically difficult.
It is also a hypothesis. That's all. It isn't a phenomenon, so we cannot yet be good Aristoteleans and observe it. Therefore, we can't develop a science of it. You'd avoid this entire webpage's worth of argument if you'd just simply remember that the singularity is nothing more than this hypothesis.
Repeat: The singularity is not a phenomenon, nor is it a theory; it is a hypothesis.
For those who wish to believe it is a correct hypothesis, and it is the future, well, get busy doing the hard work and developing the the technology to make it the future. For those who don't believe it could be a possible future, get out of our way, since you're so damn sure you're right.
In general, a singularity is a point at which an equation, surface, etc., blows up or becomes degenerate. Singularities are often also called singular points.
To call Vinge a particularly bad science fiction author says more about your critical acumen than about him. (Perhaps you're thinking about his ex-wife?)
(I read the "singularity is near" in the article title as ironic - almost parodic).
"In general, a singularity is a point at which an equation, surface, etc., blows up or becomes degenerate."
Do you also participate in discussions of Microsoft Surface by explaining that in general, a surface is a flat exterior of a coherent object?
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"To call Vinge a particularly bad science fiction author"
Vinge didn't come up the singularity; Kurtzweil did. Kurtzweil did. I quite like Vernor Vinge's work.
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"says more about your critical acumen"
Acumen is the ability to make good numeric estimations on the spot, such as business decisions.
Despite that I quite enjoy Vernor Vinge's work, I also feel it important to point out that merely should someone dislike an author you like would not, in fact, be a measurable sleight against their intelligence, any more than liking different pizza toppings would be.
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"I read the "singularity is near" in the article title as ironic"
That's interesting. If that's correct, then you have a point. (Also, bravo for being part of the one percent of the internet who knows what that word correctly means. I mean that in earnest.)
The term was coined by science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, who argues that artificial intelligence, human biological enhancement or brain-computer interfaces could be possible causes of the singularity.
It certainly lacks experimental evidence, but then again so does all other speculation about the future. That doesn't that it's illegitimate, just that it isn't scientific. On the other hand a lot of the terminology and discussion around "The Singularity" does tend to be confused, and I think that we might all be better off if we stopped using that term.
I should also point out that you're exagerating the link between the idea and science fiction authors. Campbell was a science fiction author (well mostly an editor but close enough) and Vinge was too, though Vinge was also a CS professor. The people I'd associate with the other schools of thought aren't science fiction authors, though.
"It certainly lacks experimental evidence, but then again so does all other speculation about the future."
We disagree here. The singularity made measurable predictions, and not only has every single one that's come to pass failed without exception, but the remainder are no closer to happening than the day they were made.
Remember, originally, computers were supposed to be smarter than us back in the 90s, when people still thought The Simpsons was funny.
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"I think that we might all be better off if we stopped using that term."
We agree, though I think for different reasons. If I understand you correctly, you are suggesting that we forego this term in favor of clearer, better defined ones, but keep the idea.
I think we should actually reject the concept.
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"Campbell was a science fiction author (well mostly an editor but close enough) and Vinge was too, though Vinge was also a CS professor. The people I'd associate with the other schools of thought aren't science fiction authors, though."
Minsky, who associates with that school of thought, is. Kurtzweil, who originated this school of thought, is. Stanislaw Ulam, Damien Broderick, Hans Moravec, Greg Egan, Nancy Kress, Larry Niven, Dean Ing, Samuel Delaney, Ray Solomonoff, Pohl, Aasimov, Steele, other-Steele, Yudkowsky, the founder of Singularity University (which is not legally a university) Peter Diamandis, Aubrey de Gray, et cetera.
Sort of the germane understanding is to look at their work. Whose work do they all point to? Moore, Lanier, Holland, and Hawkins.
Guess what all four of them say they think?
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"I should also point out that you're exagerating the link between the idea and science fiction authors."
I don't think that I am. Every proponent of The Singularity I am aware of writes speculative fiction for money, without exception. The list I gave above isn't even close to exhaustive.
And, again, that's not the actual point I'm making. This isn't about "the link between" The Various Singularities and speculative fiction; I'm asserting directly that every single Singular proposal is itself science fiction.
I'm not saying it's written by science fiction people. Aasimov did legitimate speculative engineering, for example, in the cases of geosynchronous orbits and the space elevator, and arguably in arcological discussion. I would not say that his work was science fiction, despite that he's a science fiction author.
Why?
Because there are real numbers involved. There's real math. There are real equations. He knew the fuel demands, the weight of the building, the energy requirements. He wasn't writing fun stories; he was doing real work.
Spend two weeks. You will _never_ find real work done around the singularity. It hasn't been done.
Earlier you suggested that all speculation about the future was so; I do not agree. We have several quite good designs for an arcology on Mars which would actually work. Seward's Folly is speculative, but it's actual legitimate work; it could be built.
The Singularity is just a cute story.
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"The people I'd associate with the other schools of thought aren't science fiction authors, though."
Schools of thought is a great phrase to try to bring gravitas to a situation where it isn't warranted.
I'll pay more attention when I see a single work on The Singularity which could pass muster as a freshman thesis at a second string state school.
There's lots of material out there about infinite energy devices, too. Ask yourself a question: if you didn't have the Second Law of Thermodynamics, how would you tell the free energy devices apart from the legitimate ones?
How is it that you know Andrea Rossi doesn't really have cold fusion?
Try some skepticism. It's delicious, and low cholesterol.
The ability to detect faces is not a signal that general intelligence is right around the corner.