Quick explanation of the singularity (and why it is a misnomer)

[ChalkChalkson]

In the last WAN show @James used the term singularity in the way it is so often referred to in the tech world, and threw around a few terms that might have confused people.

So here is the shortest possible explanation for the singularity I can give:

Singularity is when self-improvement time reaches 0, making a machine improve infinitely quickly and thus infinitely powerful. But that can't happen, so now people use it to refer to:

Quote

The singularity is, when artificial general intelligences can selfimprove quicker than humans can improve them, and reach a level of intelligence incomprehensible by humans

for the reasons outlined below.

 

Here is a version with a tiny bit more detail:

When scientists plotted the computation power available (back in the 80s I think, couldn't find the paper anymore ) and drew a trendline through it, they did not find it to be a logistic or exponential growth as you would expect from Moore's law and physical consideration, the best fitting line had what we in maths people call a singularity.

That meaning nothing but that the value goes to infinity at a finite point. This is not always crazy, when you think about the length of a small line segment very near to the poles on a typical map, that gets stretched to infinity as well. But there are also "bad" or "real" singularities like 1/0 on the 1/x plot. The singularity in the paper was a bad singularity.

Scientists generally agree that something like that can't happen with classical computers simply because infinite processes require an infinite amount of energy (there is a limit to how efficient a computer can be) and energy in the universe is limited. In fact there are a large amount of other physics reasons why that can't happen, but they require thermodynamics and everyone hates thermodynamics.

 

Now, why is everyone talking about it? Basically the media picked up the term related to the paper, that obviously got a lot of citations in the press, and so it transformed into a term referring to a time, when machines can self-improve infinitely. Now, this also can't happen, because of the same physical limits, so there is a (all be it REALLY LARGE) limit on the processing power machines can ever have in the universe.

 

Thus the only definition of the singularity that can actually happen is, that machines manage to selfimprove better than humans can improve them. And this definition is super weak, I mean technically the new alpha-go hit that goal, it selfimproved better than the version of alpha-go humans fed. So if you still want the singularity to be somewhat scary you need to add another qualifier:

 

"The singularity is, when artificial general intelligences can selfimprove quicker than humans can improve them, and reach a level of intelligence incomprehensible by humans", without any of these qualifiers the singularity is either reached, not scary or physically impossible.

At this point you can easily see that this has nothing at all to do with a real singularity, and that a 0 has also nothing to do with it, it is just a mystical misnomer with a weird etymology.

[jools]

30 seconds of my life I will never get back .....tx m8

[ChalkChalkson]

2 hours ago, jools said:

30 seconds of my life I will never get back .....tx m8

I am  very sorry... Could Zou give me some constructive feedback? More detail or less? 

[jools]

19 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

it is just a mystical misnomer with a weird etymology

sums up the whole article very concisely and there is no need to apologise , I could of stopped reading any time. It appears as if the tech world is using scientific terms imprecisely and reasonableness is disappearing down its own black hole.

[AncientNerd]

20 hours ago, ChalkChalkson said:

At this point you can easily see that this has nothing at all to do with a real singularity, and that a 0 has also nothing to do with it, it is just a mystical misnomer with a weird etymology.

Yes, that is true. However what would you call an event where we (humans) create intelligence equal to or greater than our own - be it computer, biological or combined - that improves itself faster than we can understand it?

 

Oh and it wasn't a scientist that garbed the term singularity for this event it was a science fiction author Vernor Vinge who coined the term for the concept that had been floating around since the 1940's in cryptography and computing academia. It doesn't take infinite computing power, just enough computer/software power to be incomprehensible to humans to cause this. Also how much computing power is actually connected to networks world wide right now as a distributed system?

 

Basically someone picked a snappy name, which has become synonymous with a complex concept - that happens all the time in English - it is probably too late to take the mathematical meaning back as the only meaning to the word singularity.

[ChalkChalkson]

8 hours ago, AncientNerd said:

Yes, that is true. However what would you call an event where we (humans) create intelligence equal to or greater than our own - be it computer, biological or combined - that improves itself faster than we can understand it?

I would name the form of intelligence itself, let future historians decide where the real boundaries turned out to be... something like "transhuman intelligence" or the like, to emphasize that is beyond humans, but created by them

 

8 hours ago, AncientNerd said:

Oh and it wasn't a scientist that garbed the term singularity for this event it was a science fiction author Vernor Vinge who coined the term for the concept that had been floating around since the 1940's in cryptography and computing academia. It doesn't take infinite computing power, just enough computer/software power to be incomprehensible to humans to cause this. Also how much computing power is actually connected to networks world wide right now as a distributed system?

Seems to have split origins then, the paper I was referencing had a lit. singularity in their formula... too bad I can't find it, mostly because my google results get bloated a lot by articles and papers from more modern times.

 

8 hours ago, AncientNerd said:

Basically someone picked a snappy name, which has become synonymous with a complex concept - that happens all the time in English - it is probably too late to take the mathematical meaning back as the only meaning to the word singularity.

Yeah, and I generally don't take issue with, when the original meaning is completely separate, but @James said a lot of stuff related to the original meaning, like referencing 0 a lot, and talking about convergence, which is integral to the mathematical definition (though converging to 0 is kinda wrong here). 

I hadn't written this, if I hadn't seen that the terms etymology was causing confusion about what the term means.

[ChalkChalkson]

9 hours ago, jools said:

sums up the whole article very concisely and there is no need to apologise , I could of stopped reading any time. It appears as if the tech world is using scientific terms imprecisely and reasonableness is disappearing down its own black hole.

That is a little harsh I think... 

I guess it is just confusion based on a term that now has 2 meanings... Think about a small kid confusing a British car with a wild cat 

[vanished]

I never even knew the original definition.  tbh it seems like it should have been obvious from the start that it was sort of silly.  " The singularity is, when artificial general intelligences can selfimprove quicker than humans can improve them, and reach a level of intelligence incomprehensible by humans " makes a lot more sense imo