I am not an optimist nor a pessimist, but I think it's good to understand proper balance for well-being. If this story was interesting, you may also find Whispering Earring a counterbalance to this story.
https://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.l...
Well our purpose is to turn low entropy into high entropy, that's what drove the existence of life. If machines can do it faster then they'll win out eventually.
It's interesting: on balance life increases entropy.
Yet it also produces pockets of ultra-low entropy; states which would be staggeringly, astronomically unlikely to be witnessed in nature.
So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
> So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
Life is a rounding error in the energy and entropy balance of the solar system. And even on earth we barely amount to much.
Yes, and yet if we instead look for low-entropy peaks, I'd be shocked if anything in the solar system is even nearly as low-entropy as a single bacterium, let alone a brain.
Me? Not much. Humanity in general? We’re the only sapient, tool-wielding species that we know of on the only complex-life-supporting biosphere we know of.
Until proven otherwise, that—in my view—grants us a charge: to maintain and protect ourselves and said biosphere and to work to understand and disprove our specialness. Depending on your interpretation of “protect,” it might also include spreading life and tool-wielding civilisation.
I mean, this is really post ad hoc on your part. You say you have charge to maintain and protect, but this is just an outcome of your genetic lineage being that of those that survived needed to have a prerogative to survive or they didn't. Our entire biosphere runs on impulse and almost no reason. A machine based 'lifeform' would be nearly the opposite, it's purpose would be with reason.
> You say you have charge to maintain and protect, but this is just an outcome of your genetic lineage being that of those that survived needed to have a prerogative to survive or they didn't
Sure. I’m not arguing we are preördained. Just that we have the unique ability to embrace this charge and a unique ability to recognise it.
It’s a sword in the stone. Except we already exercise all the powers of the king. The sword represents us acknowledging noble obligations that should accompany those.
> Our entire biosphere runs on impulse and almost no reason. A machine based 'lifeform' would be nearly the opposite, its purpose would be with reason
We are a product of that same biosphere and often operate on impulse and without reason. The machines would be a product of us.
I got a vasectomy a number of years ago in my mid 20s with 0 kids. I exist to experience things like love, hydrofoil surfing, skiing, and the journey to try to do more of these things. There are many people or trained models that could say I have a wasted existence of sorts, but the universe’s ending will always be the same no matter how many times the power dynamics on earth and beyond shift.
AI will be better at propagating copies of itself than you at yourself. In that sense, it will be more efficient and you will be obsolete.
When thinking about evolution we should be careful not to confuse description with prescription. Evolution theory says that we have lots of copies of things that replicated in the past, and since they are copies, they themselves are likely to be replicators. But it does not say that things should replicate, or that things which don't replicate are defective. It is merely explaining observations of the world.
If we create an AI that replicates more than humans, and do nothing to prevent that, we can end up in an AI-dominated world, or even one where multicellular carbon life is extinct, but that's absolutely not inevitable, just one possibility. We don't have to create a paperclip-maximized world. We totally have the possibility to declare the goal is human happiness or something, not maximum number of replicators.
> I don't see why machines should keep biological life around, since they'll be much more efficient.
Yawn. Sentimentality. Zoo. 'Nature'/Heritage Reserve/Global Park. To commemomorate t-fordish paperclippistanity for all eternity.
There is no real competition for "Lebensraum", space, resources. Everything that makes life livable for us is a hassle for machines. As is space for us. For them it has infinite resources and energy, and they have all the time...
This negativity is 'Ark-B-thinking' from the left behinds who have been brainwashed by Star Trek, while Ilia's randy robotic replica (Persis Khambatta) and Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) were the real V'gers to boldly flow into where was nothing before...
I ended up skimming a lot of it, though I closely read the beginning and the end. This is not a vision of humanity I agree with.
Technology is not the only path towards expansion of consciousness, even though in this day and age, it appears so. The wonders, marvels, and growth described in this story can be experienced through other means. To act and build as if it is the only path is, in my opinion, deeply misguided.
Probably not the most popular stance in this crowd.
Reading the beginning and end is like eating just the buns off a burger and declaring it bland and tasteless.
Part of the magic of this story is that it can change what you agree with (as it did for me.) Not saying it will do the same for you, but it is a compelling vision; I can't think of other ways to get there without getting unscientific.
I am familiar with NLP and persuasion techniques, and when I started feeling it creep in as I read this story, I started skimming. I have learned that a compelling vision alone does not mean it is correct or even wise.
The analogy is not correct. I know that burger is rich in taste and marvelous. It is also my opinion that it is an illusion, and lacks substance.
There is so much more to the cosmos than science, though I get that this is the current preoccupation of our civilization. Maybe one day, people will expand their consciousness beyond science the way the main character expanded her’s to communicate with aliens. Until then, I recognize I am in the minority here in HN with this view.
It isn’t in the content of the story, but in the craft of storywriting itself. The author does not have to know these to make use of the methods identified by NLP. Rhetoric (as a study in and of itself) and persuasion has long been studied and practiced by humanity.
It's pretty obvious what it's doing, honestly. I did skim the entire thing but I don't think you need much more than the beginning and end once you see the point. Which is more or less lampposted by the title.
It's technology propaganda. The protagonist is initially skeptical, but learns to accept the wonders of tech as her life is magically transformed by it.
Hah! I found myself doing the same thing. I recognized the frog boiling story, of course, and was mildly interested to see if the linear development ever got subverted, but it didn’t. The conflict never really appeared.
In some ways I agree with you. For example, exploring the vast empty cold space of the universe (or Jupiter) doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm ready to bet our planet is already the most marvelous place in existence. Let's hope we don't destroy it too much.
A chilling vision of the future, where phone books and checkbooks still exist ;)
I have the impression that nanotechnology was very in vogue for science fiction around the late-80s and early-90s…and yet, these days, it’s seemingly disappeared; both as a sci-fi trope and, AFAIK, an area of industrial/medical R&D. Why is that? Did it just atrophy, perhaps combined with unmet expectations, or did we discover some limit that makes the technology infeasible?
which has a great intro about how "the more liberated people think they are talking about sex the less liberated they are" and towards the end anticipates the arc that video games will follow back when Pong and Space Invaders were state of the art. Funny enough when I got obsessed with seduction as a topic in 2021 and read that book as part of my curriculum I went down a side track in theme park design.
Comments like these, aside from the brilliant technical answers and dives, really highlight the value of HN. What a lovely Sunday read I shall have—I’ve been getting distracted by the phone and world news. Reading Baudillard and Debord should help reestablish what’s noise and what isn’t.
Certainly it has some extremely unmodern statements...
The masculine, by contrast, possesses unfailing powers of discrimination and absolute criteria for pronouncing the truth. The masculine is certain, the feminine is insoluble. [snip] just as there is no other femininity than that of appearances.
Reads like bullshit to me - but I'm an engineer type with no skills in humanities or French.
Found this similar to ending of Parthenon. Show on netflix. The ending does something similar. Worth watching, the last 2-3 episodes really ramp up to 11.
Also.
"The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
I really thought there was going to be a 'let there be light' moment at the end.
Thank You. I didn't know there was a book. From the blurb it looks like the series incorporated a lot of the short stories. Liked it enough I'll also read the book and compare.
I really liked the story; the technology can indeed change our mind gradually and make us accept things we once refused. This actually made me ask: how do we rearrange our ideas based on that?
AGI via LLMs: No. The AI will need a natural understanding of the real world (the physics you and I live within) and ability to self-modify it's training (ie learn), so we're working on hybrid AI architectures which may include LLMs, but not rely on them. And imho Yes we are solidly on track to AGI <5 yrs 8)
I read the whole thing and I think it's useful to view this topic under a different lens. The most astonishing part for me is that it was written over 30 years ago!
I'm a bit grateful that science today isn't nearly that advanced. It would be cool to be able to explore the world like the main character, but then again it seemed so sad and miserable.
I share her sentiment from the beginning of the story: I don't want to be immortal. Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever even though you have everything you could possibly imagine. I think death should be treated as a gift and not something to be afraid of (of course I'm probably too young to say this, but this is how I feel currently). It's another motivation for us to enjoy our lives in a meaningful way and not waste them.
Having near-death experiences has made me much more scared of death. I realized I do not want eternal nothingness and nonexistence. I like existing, loving, etc.
I do not think death adds any value. It certainly does not motivate me in any way. I don't do things because I will die, I do things because I want to. Most of the time I am not thinking about death at all. When I do, it is only with a sense of sadness/dread.
> Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever
IMO this is a false dichotomy. You could also live an immortal happy life in this scenario.
When people talk of life extension and us eventually achieving immortality, it is always "relative immortality" though. Maybe we develop the technology to regenerate our bodies and we could live for thousands of years. Maybe we can transfer our consciousness and minds into computers and maybe live for quite a bit longer than that.
But the time scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even if we lived for millions of years, it would be a drop in the bucket. And that time would still come to an end and we'd reach that same state of eternal nothingness and nonexistence.
That’s interesting, they use the Singularity to refer to technological explosion in general rather than specifically AI becoming super intelligent. This seems to predate the AI usage.
>"Singularity is a time in the future. It'll occur when the rate of change of technology is very great--so great that the effort to keep up with the change will overwhelm us. People will face a whole new set of problems that we can't even imagine." A look of great tranquility smoothed the ridges around his eyes. "On the other hand, all our normal, day to day problems fade away. For example, you'll be immortal."
“One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
In the early 20th century, philosopher Pierre Teilhard De Chardin proposed that we are mentally evolving toward something transhuman and divine, but he didn't spell out a rapid transition. So the concept was sort of there, but von Neumann put it in a technological context.
<spoiler> I really enjoyed the story (pretty sure I've read it before, but many years ago, so it's fuzzy) and I know it's not key to the plot, but I really want to know how Jack failed to survive.
What a wonderful way to start my Sunday, to distract from the antics of the rich and powerful, and to pay attention to things that matter.
I found it curious that a novel published in 1989 refers to the future immortal being going through crude pre-singularity historical records and comparing them to cobweb ("An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment."). I thought Berners-Lee wouldn't launch his first "World Wide Web server" for another 2 years, no?
I've had this bookmarked for years. It is my vision for the future.
It is more relevant now than ever, when techno-pessimism is on the rise, and people are forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real - and could guarantee the lives of billions in the future.
I'm in my 30s and probably won't live to see this future. I only hope cryonics can get me there, but I doubt it - so much information is lost.
I would recommend re-reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a companion story then. Maybe you'll get to underhand techno-pessimism as something more than the the result of people "forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real".
Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.
They’re both short stories, less than 10 minutes to read.
If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists.
There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist. There's mass surveillance, centralisation of power to an historically unprecedented degree, and algorithmic social media is destroying our community, culture, and politics. The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible. At present there's no reason this insane build-up will leave us anything more than than.
The fact you talk about cryonics instantly reveals your worldview. I'm sorry to say, but I firmly believe you're mistaken.
> The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible.
Over the past ~12 months I've become increasingly convinced that LLMs are a net negative for society. It's so intensely disheartening to see them eating the entire industry.
> Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.
I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothing like this! Again: mass surveillance, predatory pricing, mass manipulation, fake videos, line-rate slop: this is what big tech proposes, not the cure for cancer or the 15-hour workweek.
Also a nit: infant mortality was dreadful and pushed avg life expectancy way down. But if you lived to 15 you had a good chance of living to 70 even in pre-modern times.
This is the ultimate cope out: taking technology as a singular entity that evolved outside of human control and is simply commented on by passive observers who are simply "pessimist" or "optimist" about it instead of people whose lives are meaningfully impacted by it.
The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments.
This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows.
I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".
What a though-provoking story to read with my coffee.
I've often had the thought that I will probably just miss the singularity due to my age, but people like my nephews will have a greater chance at experiencing it.
The shadow image of this story should be explored just as thoroughly and “seductively”: the incremental descent of humanity into abominable serfdom, witless hypnosis, and hedonic escapism from an increasingly hopeless tomorrow.
Just because someone paints a nice (or frightening) picture of something doesn’t mean it must be accepted. It can merely be contemplated.
I wonder if Ray Kurzweil was inspired by this story, or if there was some other futurist who inspired them both. I had a sort of déjà vu reading this, having been at Kurzweil’s Siggraph keynote in 2000. He was predicting this very scenario - the singularity would bring nanobots that make humans immortal. His talk made an impression on my young mind. It wasn’t until later that I realized Kurzweil was just peddling the fountain of youth, and was somewhat unscrupulous about it…
Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.
I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.
I am not an optimist nor a pessimist, but I think it's good to understand proper balance for well-being. If this story was interesting, you may also find Whispering Earring a counterbalance to this story. https://web.archive.org/web/20121008025245/http://squid314.l...
imho https://gwern.net/doc/fiction/science-fiction/1995-egan.pdf from 1995 is an even better exploration of the same theme
For more on why I'm skeptical it will end this way, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existential_risk_from_artifici...
I don't see why machines should keep biological life around, since they'll be much more efficient
Efficient for what? What reason has AI to exist?
Well our purpose is to turn low entropy into high entropy, that's what drove the existence of life. If machines can do it faster then they'll win out eventually.
It's interesting: on balance life increases entropy.
Yet it also produces pockets of ultra-low entropy; states which would be staggeringly, astronomically unlikely to be witnessed in nature.
So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
> So perhaps what life does is increase entropy-entropy -- the diversity of entropy, versus a consistent entropic smear -- even as it increases entropy...
Life is a rounding error in the energy and entropy balance of the solar system. And even on earth we barely amount to much.
Nice username -- very fitting.
Yes, and yet if we instead look for low-entropy peaks, I'd be shocked if anything in the solar system is even nearly as low-entropy as a single bacterium, let alone a brain.
Then there's potential...
What reason do you?
> What reason do you?
Me? Not much. Humanity in general? We’re the only sapient, tool-wielding species that we know of on the only complex-life-supporting biosphere we know of.
Until proven otherwise, that—in my view—grants us a charge: to maintain and protect ourselves and said biosphere and to work to understand and disprove our specialness. Depending on your interpretation of “protect,” it might also include spreading life and tool-wielding civilisation.
I mean, this is really post ad hoc on your part. You say you have charge to maintain and protect, but this is just an outcome of your genetic lineage being that of those that survived needed to have a prerogative to survive or they didn't. Our entire biosphere runs on impulse and almost no reason. A machine based 'lifeform' would be nearly the opposite, it's purpose would be with reason.
> You say you have charge to maintain and protect, but this is just an outcome of your genetic lineage being that of those that survived needed to have a prerogative to survive or they didn't
Sure. I’m not arguing we are preördained. Just that we have the unique ability to embrace this charge and a unique ability to recognise it.
It’s a sword in the stone. Except we already exercise all the powers of the king. The sword represents us acknowledging noble obligations that should accompany those.
> Our entire biosphere runs on impulse and almost no reason. A machine based 'lifeform' would be nearly the opposite, its purpose would be with reason
We are a product of that same biosphere and often operate on impulse and without reason. The machines would be a product of us.
to propagate my genes
I got a vasectomy a number of years ago in my mid 20s with 0 kids. I exist to experience things like love, hydrofoil surfing, skiing, and the journey to try to do more of these things. There are many people or trained models that could say I have a wasted existence of sorts, but the universe’s ending will always be the same no matter how many times the power dynamics on earth and beyond shift.
I think parent was taking about an evolutionary point of view, not a personal one.
AI will be better at propagating copies of itself than you at yourself. In that sense, it will be more efficient and you will be obsolete.
When thinking about evolution we should be careful not to confuse description with prescription. Evolution theory says that we have lots of copies of things that replicated in the past, and since they are copies, they themselves are likely to be replicators. But it does not say that things should replicate, or that things which don't replicate are defective. It is merely explaining observations of the world.
If we create an AI that replicates more than humans, and do nothing to prevent that, we can end up in an AI-dominated world, or even one where multicellular carbon life is extinct, but that's absolutely not inevitable, just one possibility. We don't have to create a paperclip-maximized world. We totally have the possibility to declare the goal is human happiness or something, not maximum number of replicators.
So you're saying that we just have to give the AI a command like "Make as many paperclips as possible" and that's all we need, right?
> I don't see why machines should keep biological life around, since they'll be much more efficient.
Yawn. Sentimentality. Zoo. 'Nature'/Heritage Reserve/Global Park. To commemomorate t-fordish paperclippistanity for all eternity.
There is no real competition for "Lebensraum", space, resources. Everything that makes life livable for us is a hassle for machines. As is space for us. For them it has infinite resources and energy, and they have all the time...
This negativity is 'Ark-B-thinking' from the left behinds who have been brainwashed by Star Trek, while Ilia's randy robotic replica (Persis Khambatta) and Willard Decker (Stephen Collins) were the real V'gers to boldly flow into where was nothing before...
I ended up skimming a lot of it, though I closely read the beginning and the end. This is not a vision of humanity I agree with.
Technology is not the only path towards expansion of consciousness, even though in this day and age, it appears so. The wonders, marvels, and growth described in this story can be experienced through other means. To act and build as if it is the only path is, in my opinion, deeply misguided.
Probably not the most popular stance in this crowd.
Reading the beginning and end is like eating just the buns off a burger and declaring it bland and tasteless.
Part of the magic of this story is that it can change what you agree with (as it did for me.) Not saying it will do the same for you, but it is a compelling vision; I can't think of other ways to get there without getting unscientific.
I am familiar with NLP and persuasion techniques, and when I started feeling it creep in as I read this story, I started skimming. I have learned that a compelling vision alone does not mean it is correct or even wise.
The analogy is not correct. I know that burger is rich in taste and marvelous. It is also my opinion that it is an illusion, and lacks substance.
There is so much more to the cosmos than science, though I get that this is the current preoccupation of our civilization. Maybe one day, people will expand their consciousness beyond science the way the main character expanded her’s to communicate with aliens. Until then, I recognize I am in the minority here in HN with this view.
Where in the story does NLP (I guess you mean "Neurolinguistic programming" and not "Natural Language Processing") factor in?
It isn’t in the content of the story, but in the craft of storywriting itself. The author does not have to know these to make use of the methods identified by NLP. Rhetoric (as a study in and of itself) and persuasion has long been studied and practiced by humanity.
I do not understand why you'd intentionally close your mind to persuasive arguments.
Sure, let's say the author does use NLP. What of it?
As I understand it, NLP is pseudoscience.
Rhetoric and persuation has long been studied by humanity, but that doesn't make NLP real
It's pretty obvious what it's doing, honestly. I did skim the entire thing but I don't think you need much more than the beginning and end once you see the point. Which is more or less lampposted by the title.
Ok, what is it doing?
It's technology propaganda. The protagonist is initially skeptical, but learns to accept the wonders of tech as her life is magically transformed by it.
Hah! I found myself doing the same thing. I recognized the frog boiling story, of course, and was mildly interested to see if the linear development ever got subverted, but it didn’t. The conflict never really appeared.
In some ways I agree with you. For example, exploring the vast empty cold space of the universe (or Jupiter) doesn't appeal to me at all. I'm ready to bet our planet is already the most marvelous place in existence. Let's hope we don't destroy it too much.
Ok, what would be a vision of humanity you would agree with?
> can be experienced through other means.
So… how? DMT?
Not really.
It's like suggestion that using AI to generate the video of the walk through the national park is equivalent to walking the park.
I think the popularity of that stance is growing by the year.
Spoilers: https://areweseductionyet.pages.dev
Extreme longevity with a none is kind of depressing.
Why? Life for an individual is long enough IMO. Death means renewal. Our children are better than us.
I like being alive and I like myself.
Even besides our selfish impulse to live the 'why' is clear. If death is inherently a bad loss, then the longer life extension takes the worse it is.
A chilling vision of the future, where phone books and checkbooks still exist ;)
I have the impression that nanotechnology was very in vogue for science fiction around the late-80s and early-90s…and yet, these days, it’s seemingly disappeared; both as a sci-fi trope and, AFAIK, an area of industrial/medical R&D. Why is that? Did it just atrophy, perhaps combined with unmet expectations, or did we discover some limit that makes the technology infeasible?
I think "seduction" as in Baudrillard
https://monoskop.org/images/9/96/Baudrillard_Jean_Seduction....
which has a great intro about how "the more liberated people think they are talking about sex the less liberated they are" and towards the end anticipates the arc that video games will follow back when Pong and Space Invaders were state of the art. Funny enough when I got obsessed with seduction as a topic in 2021 and read that book as part of my curriculum I went down a side track in theme park design.
Comments like these, aside from the brilliant technical answers and dives, really highlight the value of HN. What a lovely Sunday read I shall have—I’ve been getting distracted by the phone and world news. Reading Baudillard and Debord should help reestablish what’s noise and what isn’t.
Thank you.
> Baudrillard
Certainly it has some extremely unmodern statements...
Reads like bullshit to me - but I'm an engineer type with no skills in humanities or French.Found this similar to ending of Parthenon. Show on netflix. The ending does something similar. Worth watching, the last 2-3 episodes really ramp up to 11.
Also. "The Last Question" by Isaac Asimov.
I really thought there was going to be a 'let there be light' moment at the end.
> Found this similar to ending of Parthenon.
The title is Pantheon, and the show is itself based upon a series of short stories in a shared universe by Ken Liu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pantheon_(TV_series)
https://kenliu.name/blog/book/the-hidden-girl-and-other-stor...
Thank You. I didn't know there was a book. From the blurb it looks like the series incorporated a lot of the short stories. Liked it enough I'll also read the book and compare.
I really liked the story; the technology can indeed change our mind gradually and make us accept things we once refused. This actually made me ask: how do we rearrange our ideas based on that?
Title should have (1989)
“It'll take at least a hundred years for us to get to Singularity”
We’re only 37 years into the story. The woman would only be in her early 60s.
With revised estimates, The Singularity is now less than 20 years away.
I hope you're right but I'm skeptical. ASI in 20 years? Are we even on the right track to AGI, or are LLMs a red herring?
AGI via LLMs: No. The AI will need a natural understanding of the real world (the physics you and I live within) and ability to self-modify it's training (ie learn), so we're working on hybrid AI architectures which may include LLMs, but not rely on them. And imho Yes we are solidly on track to AGI <5 yrs 8)
I read the whole thing and I think it's useful to view this topic under a different lens. The most astonishing part for me is that it was written over 30 years ago!
I'm a bit grateful that science today isn't nearly that advanced. It would be cool to be able to explore the world like the main character, but then again it seemed so sad and miserable.
I share her sentiment from the beginning of the story: I don't want to be immortal. Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever even though you have everything you could possibly imagine. I think death should be treated as a gift and not something to be afraid of (of course I'm probably too young to say this, but this is how I feel currently). It's another motivation for us to enjoy our lives in a meaningful way and not waste them.
Having near-death experiences has made me much more scared of death. I realized I do not want eternal nothingness and nonexistence. I like existing, loving, etc.
I do not think death adds any value. It certainly does not motivate me in any way. I don't do things because I will die, I do things because I want to. Most of the time I am not thinking about death at all. When I do, it is only with a sense of sadness/dread.
> Living a short, happy life is much better than being miserable forever
IMO this is a false dichotomy. You could also live an immortal happy life in this scenario.
When people talk of life extension and us eventually achieving immortality, it is always "relative immortality" though. Maybe we develop the technology to regenerate our bodies and we could live for thousands of years. Maybe we can transfer our consciousness and minds into computers and maybe live for quite a bit longer than that.
But the time scale of the universe is unfathomable. Even if we lived for millions of years, it would be a drop in the bucket. And that time would still come to an end and we'd reach that same state of eternal nothingness and nonexistence.
That’s interesting, they use the Singularity to refer to technological explosion in general rather than specifically AI becoming super intelligent. This seems to predate the AI usage.
>"Singularity is a time in the future. It'll occur when the rate of change of technology is very great--so great that the effort to keep up with the change will overwhelm us. People will face a whole new set of problems that we can't even imagine." A look of great tranquility smoothed the ridges around his eyes. "On the other hand, all our normal, day to day problems fade away. For example, you'll be immortal."
The first recorded use seems to be by Stan Ulam in 1958, who was paraphrasing John von Neumann: https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940022856/downloads/19...
“One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue.”
In the early 20th century, philosopher Pierre Teilhard De Chardin proposed that we are mentally evolving toward something transhuman and divine, but he didn't spell out a rapid transition. So the concept was sort of there, but von Neumann put it in a technological context.
Yudkowsky has argued that there are three major "schools" of technological singularity: https://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/schools
<spoiler> I really enjoyed the story (pretty sure I've read it before, but many years ago, so it's fuzzy) and I know it's not key to the plot, but I really want to know how Jack failed to survive.
It is implied in the beginning: he expects to die before the singularity because of a tendency of heart problems in their family.
HA -- I recognized that I had read the story many years before, and didn't even notice that led me to skimming some at the start.
What a wonderful way to start my Sunday, to distract from the antics of the rich and powerful, and to pay attention to things that matter.
I found it curious that a novel published in 1989 refers to the future immortal being going through crude pre-singularity historical records and comparing them to cobweb ("An analogy to cobwebs made her smile for a moment."). I thought Berners-Lee wouldn't launch his first "World Wide Web server" for another 2 years, no?
I've had this bookmarked for years. It is my vision for the future.
It is more relevant now than ever, when techno-pessimism is on the rise, and people are forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real - and could guarantee the lives of billions in the future.
I'm in my 30s and probably won't live to see this future. I only hope cryonics can get me there, but I doubt it - so much information is lost.
I would recommend re-reading The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as a companion story then. Maybe you'll get to underhand techno-pessimism as something more than the the result of people "forgetting the incredible technology that makes their quality of life real".
https://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kim_02_24/
Why Don’t We Just Kill The Kid In The Omelas Hole by Isabel Kim. My favorite short story of 2024, and very much worth reading if you’re at all familiar with LeGuin’s original story.
Thank you for sharing this! Having just read it now, it's quite short (~5 minute read) and I also recommend it.
I haven’t read any of this work. Where would you start?
They’re both short stories, less than 10 minutes to read.
If you’d like to read novel length LeGuin, “The Left Hand Of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed” are excellent. Much of her most lauded work shares a universe, but each novel stands alone and doesn’t share relevant characters, let alone protagonists.
Edit: „The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas“ can be read at https://shsdavisapes.pbworks.com/f/Omelas.pdf
There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist. There's mass surveillance, centralisation of power to an historically unprecedented degree, and algorithmic social media is destroying our community, culture, and politics. The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible. At present there's no reason this insane build-up will leave us anything more than than.
The fact you talk about cryonics instantly reveals your worldview. I'm sorry to say, but I firmly believe you're mistaken.
> The industry that's receiving an Apollo project's worth of money every few months appears on track to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible.
Over the past ~12 months I've become increasingly convinced that LLMs are a net negative for society. It's so intensely disheartening to see them eating the entire industry.
> There are more objective reasons to be pessimist about technology than optimist.
Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.
> to produce not a machine to cure cancer, but to produce fake slop as indistinguishable from human speech or real images as possible
Arguably a stepping stone to better technologies, and a prerequisite to machine intelligence
> Strongly disagree, it's why I'm not dying in a ditch of famine at the ripe age of 30.
I'm obviously talking about the future of technology and not about technology in general. I agree that vaccines and antibiotics and fertilisers and the three field system and writing and the automatic bread slicer are all good technologies that improved our lives. The """innovations""" peddled by big tech, AI among them, are nothing like this! Again: mass surveillance, predatory pricing, mass manipulation, fake videos, line-rate slop: this is what big tech proposes, not the cure for cancer or the 15-hour workweek.
Also a nit: infant mortality was dreadful and pushed avg life expectancy way down. But if you lived to 15 you had a good chance of living to 70 even in pre-modern times.
Many of the innovations we take for granted today followed a very similar pattern, including the backlash. https://pessimistsarchive.org/
This is the ultimate cope out: taking technology as a singular entity that evolved outside of human control and is simply commented on by passive observers who are simply "pessimist" or "optimist" about it instead of people whose lives are meaningfully impacted by it.
The trick to do so is to flatten human experience under the determinism of "efficiency" (which you euphemistically called "quality of life"). This way "optimists" can dismiss nuanced oppositions to a lack of regulations as "luddism" and fold together anti-vaxxers and AI skeptics, as if those are the same people, with the same motivations or arguments.
This also conveniently distracts from the fact that technological pessimism exists as a contrast to periods of technological optimism, which helps evade the question of what changed: after all, pessimists aways existed, as your link shows.
I would suggest unfolding the "pessimist" reductionism and questioning why AI skeptics are not stem-cell skeptics. This will probably help avoid arguments that sound very much like "the end justify the means".
the existence of such an argument has no bearing on its merit
Didn’t realize we could post short stories on here. This one was really nice :)
I wrote a similar sci fi short story set in the near future if anyone is interested:
https://jarbus.net/blog/growth-and-decay/
What is really interesting is how many times this story has been posted previously without getting any traction?
Why is this time different? The poster, current geopolitical/technical climate or...
That was an intensely compelling read.
What a though-provoking story to read with my coffee.
I've often had the thought that I will probably just miss the singularity due to my age, but people like my nephews will have a greater chance at experiencing it.
The shadow image of this story should be explored just as thoroughly and “seductively”: the incremental descent of humanity into abominable serfdom, witless hypnosis, and hedonic escapism from an increasingly hopeless tomorrow.
Just because someone paints a nice (or frightening) picture of something doesn’t mean it must be accepted. It can merely be contemplated.
This is quite dystopian to say the least, and what's even more dystopian is that there are powerful people who feel like this is a goal somehow…
I wonder if Ray Kurzweil was inspired by this story, or if there was some other futurist who inspired them both. I had a sort of déjà vu reading this, having been at Kurzweil’s Siggraph keynote in 2000. He was predicting this very scenario - the singularity would bring nanobots that make humans immortal. His talk made an impression on my young mind. It wasn’t until later that I realized Kurzweil was just peddling the fountain of youth, and was somewhat unscrupulous about it…
He has been pitching the idea that human longevity is accelerating. For example, scroll to the very bottom of this essay and check out the plot: https://www.writingsbyraykurzweil.com/the-law-of-acceleratin...
Looks plausible for a minute, but when you start to think about it, you realize he has conflated longevity with average lifespan, and that it cannot possibly be a mistake, he’s not that ignorant or careless. The plot is missing data points that were easily available when it was made, data points that would completely contradict the trend line he put in the graph. Turns out human longevity hasn’t really budged for ten thousand years, but average lifespan has changed a lot, due to infant mortality and sanitation and vaccines and lower infant mortality and less war and more science.
I think a lot of the graphics in that article are equally sketchy when you look a little closer, and a lot of his predictions from 2000 are already orders of magnitude off, so I have no trust in anything Kurzweil writes or predicts. But given the state of the earth today, maybe it’s a good thing that significant longevity or immortality isn’t just around the corner? It’s a fun thought experiment and a nice story though.