The Blue Brain project is modeling neurons with a degree of detail that most electrophysiologists are happy with. There’s a great many things they aren’t modeling yet, like homeostasis and neuromodulatory connections, but all of those are at least an order of magnitude slower than the diffeq calculations of membrane conductance and as such are computational small fry. The model has problems, but the scale of the model is acceptably close to what’s needed to simulate neural function, give or take an order of magnitude.

IBM’s Blue Gene, on which Blue Brain runs, maxes out at 500 teraflops.

At this speed, they can simulate 10k neurons with their connections in 1/100 real time.

This works out to 5 teraflops per real-time neuron. This is closer to an upper bound, since they’re ignoring a number of potential shortcuts which might save a great deal of speed.

At ten billion neurons per human brain, we’ll need 50 yottaflops to emulate an entire human brain in real time.

At the current pace of Moore’s Law, that means supercomputers will be able to emulate the human brain around 2040.

But that’s for supercomputers. People won’t really be affected until it hits their personal computers. That’s about a 10 year lag. So, 2050.

Add 10 years for adoption. There will be problems – legal, moral, social – but the siren song of eternity is a strong one, even if it means having your brain flayed into tiny bits to be scanned and uploaded.

That’s the biological side of the Singularity. We have the technology to destructively scan brains right now, but like Farnsworth reactors (hot fusion) it’s hard engineering to scale up to histological sizes, let alone entire brains, without anything going wrong in the process. That’s just a matter of investment, and aged billionaires will probably be willing to invest quite a lot when the time is right.

Nondestructive scanning is more like cold fusion, or AI: theoretically possible, but no one has the slightest clue how to go about it aside from waving hands and screaming “NANITES” at each other.

Anyway, this has gone on long enough. There’s your Singularity.

If you want to start in on the messy problems we’ll see, here’s one: every post-Singularity universe dodges the issue of cloning, but that’s going to be a real possibility. Like copying music, it’s not going to be something easily regulated away, nor should it be. We’ll find incredible value in Sorcerer’s Apprentice scenarios, where a single expert makes numerous copies of themself to multiply their work. When do copies stop being data and start being human beings, with all the inalienable rights therein? If I might humor myself with a little prophecy, I predict that this will become the dominant form of human reproduction. Meatbags grow too slow to keep up with computer production. Digital families are another romantic alternative: some number of parents chip in for a blank brain, a tabula rasa, which they raise as their child in the customary manner. Dawww as that may be, it’s still expensive and slow compared to copying yourself and moving on.

On a personal note, I think it is great to see your kids grow up to be better than their parents…

Also, you will find that the smart weirdos from Singularity Institute are mainly concerned with the singularity posing an existential risk that will be very difficult to contain (if at all).

The observation that novelists commonly (and probably erroneously) believe that technological progress tends to stop where it benefits us was quite often voiced in the 1970es. Now it is neither original nor true. Golden Era SF arguably became carried away with the promises of a bright future, but most current SF is usually seriously dystopian. The future has been taken from us, and it is probably not going to come back.

The problem is that this person doesn’t understand Vinge’s premise: once intelligence finds a way to apply itself to increasing intelligence, there will be a feedback loop of intelligence increase whose consequences are impossible to predict or understand with the intelligence we have today.

If the idea behind the singularity is based on an intelligence feedback loop then it began when we started writing things down, allowing ideas to exist outside the confines of a brain. Or maybe when we started developing complex language, allowing ideas to spread from one brain to another across space and time. Either way, it’s been happening for a long long time.*

I never quite understood why a future that is “impossible to predict or understand” with our current frame of reference is any different that what we’ve always had. Jules Verne was arguably the most gifted, forward-thinking futurist of his generation but his predictions of 21st century life were less “iPhone” and more “battle zeppelin.” The future has always been a mystery and will remain so until we get there.

(*I know, I know… “this is different because we’re gonna have sentient, superintelligent machines any time now.” Well, maybe and maybe not.)

But by the time a brain imaging system have been developed, we are likely to already having mapped the various sensory inputs and found ways to emulate them. Then it will be a short jump from there to attaching those emulations to a brain image, and bootstrap it all into the brain equivalent of a virtual machine.

The Singularity is not Utopia. It’s the compounded effort of all ingenuity all at once, at once. Just because you can know everything ever known (as fast as physically possible), doesn’t mean you’ll make good decisions. My issue is, will we understand the technology we are using, or will it still be a secret? And will it be available to all, if they so wish. If everybody knows all that can be known, then the playing field is re-leveled, and how you utilize the knowledge will be important.

Something of enkiv2′s list 1) & 2) combined. 3) is only possible if we are able to break away from our socio-political ambitions and start seeing the exalted Forest for the Trees. Are we a species of individuals, or are we individuals of a species?

Vote for dystopia. of course, so much traffic, no single thought will be heard clearly. So, really, nothing will change.

Here’s a link to a trailer which has some dialogue about cloning slaves you may find amusing:

http://trailersfromhell.com/trailers/589

Thanx to DVDsavant for the link!

http://www.dvdsavant.com/

Gall’s “Fundamental Theorem” — the tenet with which he begins the book:
New Systems Mean New Problems.

“When a new system is set up to accomplish some goal, a new entity has come into being — the system itself. No matter what the ‘goal’ of the system, it immediately begins to exhibit systems-behavior, that is, to act according to the general laws that govern the operation of all systems [e.g., from later in the book, 'Large systems usually operate in failure mode.']. Now the system itself has to be dealt with. Whereas before there was only the Problem — such as warfare between nations, or garbage collection — there is now an additional universe of problems associated with the functioning or merely the presence of the new system.”

God(s) bless John Gall.

The problem with the singularity is far deeper. It assumes that the mind can exist without a body and its environment. Impossible.

“The Singularity,” in its many guises and iterations, assumes no such thing. Now, in the versions where people are uploaded, they’ll either live in virtual worlds that feel similar to the real ones, or be placed inside robotic bodies with similar sensory inputs. Perhaps both.

It may be that sentient beings can exist as pure thought, but those beings would be very different from us. We would require extensive modification, at the very least.

I never quite understood why a future that is “impossible to predict or understand” with our current frame of reference is any different that what we’ve always had.

I think the difference is a matter of timeframe. Only having a vague idea what our world will be like in twenty or thirty years is one thing. Having no idea what it will be like in six months, or next week… well, that’s a whole ‘nother ball of superintelligent gray goop.

What’s funny here, is the fact Newitz doesn’t seem to be ruling out Vinge’s Singularity at all — just Kurtweil’s version. But we don’t know a Vingian Singularity will happen at all! And, if it does, by its very nature we can’t know what is on the other side OR IT WOULDN”T BE A SINGULARITY!

I wrote about this problem in my essay “I am not a Singulatarian”: http://jackwilliambell.livejournal.com/189509.html

“What do we know? Well, based on the ebb and flow of human history we can be certain there is no change which doesn’t bring some good and some bad. Quite often the bad can be really bad. In the case of something as transforming as a Technological Singularity it might even be world-endingly bad. Outcomes involving drastic changes to our species fall into the ‘good’ side of the ledger, because the red-ink side doesn’t include us at all!”

As far as I’ve read, Kurzweil seems to be the only one whose view toward it seems rapturous.

I think it’ll happen, and shit will go wrong in about 10,000 different ways while going right in about 10,481 ways. Pretty much as cooking, agriculture, the Industrial Revolution, and the information age have.

When cyberpunk authors were predicting the internet, they didn’t come up with the blink tag, 4chan, Facebook, Chatroulette, iTunes, the DMCA, LOLcats, Fake Steve Jobs, or Android. It was pretty much Second Life with dudes in leather jackets with swords, and everything was Japanese.

Your ideas about mental coordinate transforms are interesting, if necessarily a bit vague. I have thought quite a bit about mapping mind-space, I’m not saying that mind is unidimensional, however there are potentially meaningful unidimensional measures which can be constructed of minds in mindspace which correspond to linear algebra concepts such as the determinant, the magnitude of the principal eigenvalue, and the span.

Moving back to conventional psychometrics, the empirical evidence suggests that the nature of problem solving abilities seldom differs radically between people, the structure of dependencies and correlations of those abilities is hierarchical (see Carroll’s three-stratum theory for more), and that there is a basis for comparison of people not only of narrow-ability factors but far more for the overall g factor. Savants and those with wild talents like lightning calculators and eidetic memory may not fit into this scheme – but I wouldn’t say for sure that they don’t. We already know that the bell-curve assumption is wrong and leptokurtosis is rampant – so these may be part of the fat tail of existing abilities.

So if you can copy your brain/soul/personality and upload then other people can too. Then it can be copied and remixed. Who owns the copyright on you? And is that copyright worth anything?

If the idea behind the singularity is based on an intelligence feedback loop then it began when we started writing things down, allowing ideas to exist outside the confines of a brain…. I never quite understood why a future that is “impossible to predict or understand” with our current frame of reference is any different that what we’ve always had.

Good points. I had writing and Google in mind as examples of ways natural intelligence has already been applied to increasing itself when I wrote that. Others have noted that to those going through the singularity, it may not be obvious whether anything fundamental has changed, as in the scene in Accelerando when the uploaded intelligences in the coke-can sized starship are arguing with each other over whether there was a singularity. It’s like falling into a black hole – you don’t notice anything too unusual as you cross the event horizon.

There is a potential difference from past changes, though, with radical increases in intelligence. A neolithic baby brought forward to today would have no trouble adapting, but could not adapt with her existing intelligence potential to a world where the average intelligence had doubled. SF readers could cope with going to a time when the gadgets, government, society and so forth are different (within a wide range corresponding to all but the weirdest or worst SF scenarios) but they couldn’t cope with going to a time when the equivalent of opening a door requires factoring a thousand-digit number or understanding everyday news involves category-theory concepts that just don’t fit into a human brain.

There is a potential for the future to be far more alien to us than anything today would have been to a person of the past. The really unfathomable differences are most likely to come from changes in desires, interests and goals. Take out sex, food, money, possessions, power, knowledge, socializing and sports from the motivations of future people and replace them with things that are to the old motivations as a cuneiform barley accounting tablet is to a hypertext version of Finnegan’s Wake. There’s no telling what such people would want, let alone what they would do individually, still less what they would do collectively.

I’m also skeptical that any kind of conscious AI or human upload will happen any time in the next few decades. The problems and complexities are far greater than the enthusiasts or even most experts realize. To future people the idea of simulating a brain with today’s ideas of black-box neurons, electrical action potentials and dumb synapses will seem as crazy as trying to go to the moon on a sailing ship pulled by birds. “Can you believe those witch-doctor silicon-age neuroscientists?!” they will say. “They didn’t even suspect acoustic signaling! Despite the propagation speed and seeing the axons actually pulsing! Let alone the cytoskeletal mechanical resonance spectra. Wouldn’t even listen even after the physicists spelled everything out and people had already built phased-array ultrasonic neural stimulators. No, they wouldn’t give up that ridiculous Hodgkin-Huxley model no matter how many times it was shown to violate the laws of thermodynamics, yet still insisted that heat would decohere quantum entanglement in the brain even after it had already been observed in plants…”

I think the future path of radical intelligence augmentation will go something like this: non-invasive mind-machine interfaces will come first, with some sensory and motor temporary add-ons as well as deep brain stimulation, then some low-performance partial brain prosthetics, then much later elective permanent partial upgrades. Uploads won’t happen until there are really good wet, body-temperature molecular disassemblers, which will be at least a few decades out (and uploads will also likely need a few orders of magnitude more computation than Moravec and Kurtzweil think, much of that as quantum computing). It may never be economically feasible, but if it is, then uploads will have much more scope for modification and machine interface than meat people. At the moment there seems to be no reason to think designed rather than evolved AI will ever work, but with sufficiently augmented natural-origin intelligence designing, who knows?

Besides, out of 100 people, how many people even understand computers? Deep down? Electronics?I’m sorry, but you’re friends shouldn’t be stunned by your ‘wizardry’ in creating flashers. The inherent problem is that WE are not Technology. We and Technology are intertwined but not the same, it is our sociopathic child. If technology is following exponential growth at a high rate, we need to jump on, understand it now, and wrangle it. Otherwise, seen as a force of magic, only the understanding and wealthy enough (or both) will have even the slightest notion of how to wield it.

Her basic premise that The Singularity will not be the “fluffy, kittehs, all-is-good-and-light” event that so many make it out to be it spot-on.

However, the idea that she glosses over most is the coming intelligence explosion. For the first time in the history of humanity there will be greater-than-human-intellect on the planet. That intellect may be born of humanity, however it will not be human.

Ms. Newell underestimates the effect and affects this will have. By orders of magnitude.

Until machines can carry out all the boring manual research themselves, we’re OK. But after that, yep, it’s the end of the human era. Will these super-intelligent entities be our benevolent slaves? Hmmm. Watch “Animatrix – The Second Renaissance”.

The varieties of technological singularities I’ve come across are as follows:
1) The ‘jumping jesus’ effect (or, as someone above cited, I^2 — intelligence working to improve intelligence; that said, the jumping jesus effect isn’t precisely the same thing, but it’s close enough): the more knowledge one has, the easier it is to get knowledge, so knowledge tends to grow exponentially.
2) The posthuman singularity: the jumping jesus effect will let us modify ourselves to the point where we will no longer be considered human
3) The Moravek nerd-rapture singularity (this is a subvariety of the posthuman technological singularity, which is a subvariety of the jumping jesus effect): when tech gets to the point where AGI is not only possible but cheap, humans will transplant their consciousness into artificial constructs with longer shelf lives. This tends to be where utopianism starts getting to crazy levels, but there’s a lot of fiction that transplants the moravek upload stuff into a dystopian or negative-utopian light: _Altered Carbon_ and _Down And Out In The Magic Kingdom_ are good examples.
4) The Kurzweil AI Singularity: when AI becomes not just possible but cheap, all the previously AI-complete problems will be solved. There’s more dystopian than utopian material related to this, which is unfortunate: RUR could be said to start the trend (though the universal robots in question are biological in RUR, much like the andies/replicants in _Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep_ / Blade Runner), and I needn’t list the more recent examples.
5) The tiplerian singularity: some time near the heat death of the universe, all the information throughout time will merge simultaneously, causing everyone to come back from the dead and live forever in limbo because of some obscure mathematics and HEP theory. Might be pathological science.
6) The GB singularity: earth as a superorganism will ‘wake up’, humans (being its neurons, connected by axons formed of communication networks) will know this somehow, maybe. Utopian amongst techno-hippies. A lot of people assume this has already happened, and that we neurons won’t, can’t, or shouldn’t know the details of the macrocosm.
7) The (weak) jumping-jesus effect: technology progresses in complex ways and causes unexpected effects, making it both hard to predict the near future and hard to understand the recent past
8) Something about black holes

As you can see, it’s pretty hard to talk about the ‘singularity’ without specifying which of the above you refer to. In some of the above, nobody could claim with a straight face that they haven’t happened already, and in others, few could claim with a straight face that they are likely to happen, while there is at least one that constitutes a total non-sequitor in this context.

Reminds me of one of my favorite David Byrne lyrics: “Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens.”

I’m reading Charles Stross’ “Saturn’s Children” right now, and loving the vision of posthuman culture, both familiar and utterly alien. This novel is generating much inner distress for me, as I contemplate its future world without “humans” yet filled with all of humanities legacy and so much more. But forcing one to imagine something else is what great (science) fiction can do.

Furthermore, we should want to emulate the brain because it’s better than dying, even if you gotta die to do it.

Humans are nearly incalculably more intelligent than any given fish. Yet, has that prevented environment, free will, and externalities from creating socially negative behavior in human actions? Not at all. It’s only made the manifestations of them wholly imperceivable and incomprehensible to a fish. They’re still there though. It’s a zero-sum progress.

Thus, while it is likely true that culture of the singularity would be incomprehensible to us, that doesn’t preclude it from retaining the normal distribution of “good” and “bad” in an individual’s actions which goes back far earlier than our existence as a species. It may just redefine what those terms come to mean, much the same as what is deemed morally correct nowdays differs from that of a few centuries ago.