[the.crooked]

Less so lack of free will, more so never ending complexity in science.

[fermentor666]

It has to end at some point, though, doesn't it? Because it started somewhere, and we all know "everything that has a beginning has an end".

[the.crooked]

Does counting have an end?


Do numbers end?

[the.crooked]

If not, does not something which is built on a never ending process also not end?


Rather, look at it this way, if counting, the structure of evidence in science, is infinite, then the very means by which we measure data always leads to another level of observation.


Science is a never ending process.

[fermentor666]

Hmmm, well now you are talking mathematics. I'm talking more about the universe and our understanding of existence, neither of which are infinite, unless you count theories about reincarnation or seperate dimensions/universe where your conciousness resides forever. But at a certain point, if we are to believe the universe is shrinking, all living things will eventually end, and I believe that all conciousness/soul would no longer exist.

[pornbooth]

ive always concidered my conciousness to be a simulation from my brain, so it will cease to exist after the computer in my head quits recieving power.

[lord_casek]

anyone else read dan browns book "digital fortress"?

[fermentor666]

No.

[lord_casek]

it's fairly interesting. alot of the tech he talks about is/was real at the time it came out.
thing is, he shoulda stuck to books like that, and left the jesus davinci books alone.

[the.crooked]

Originally Posted by fermentor666 (View Original Post)

Hmmm, well now you are talking mathematics. I'm talking more about the universe and our understanding of existence, neither of which are infinite, unless you count theories about reincarnation or seperate dimensions/universe where your conciousness resides forever. But at a certain point, if we are to believe the universe is shrinking, all living things will eventually end, and I believe that all conciousness/soul would no longer exist.

To the contrary,

What is a point if not infinite?

Even if the universe is closed (which I personally doubt and which brane theory and m-theory openly negate) then all things will be brought to a point. An abstract concept of mathematics. There is no need to seperate our conceptions of the two.

And why isn't our understanding of existence infinite? We speak of it through language, no? We have rules of recursion which allow for an infinite possibility of combinations to express thoughts through finite number of terms.

The infinite is a much larger part of life than I think many people notice.

If you believe in science than mathematics is the universe. Nothing more, nothing less.

[the.crooked]

Originally Posted by lord_casek (View Original Post)

anyone else read dan browns book "digital fortress"?

While quantum encryption and computing is awesome and will do amazing things in the coming years, this book blew ass.

Dan Brown is a horrible writer.


I will argue this to my death.

[lord_casek]

Originally Posted by the.crooked (View Original Post)

While quantum encryption and computing is awesome and will do amazing things in the coming years, this book blew ass.

Dan Brown is a horrible writer.


I will argue this to my death.

eh, i liked the story. there are better authors, but it was a good story.

[the.crooked]

I read angels and demons, dug it, then read digital fortress and wanted to punch the man in the face for both books.


but yes, the story itself was not bad. just his writing. fucking horrid.

[lord_casek]

angels and demons was kinda cool.
liked it more than df.

[fermentor666]

Originally Posted by the.crooked (View Original Post)

To the contrary,

What is a point if not infinite?

Even if the universe is closed (which I personally doubt and which brane theory and m-theory openly negate) then all things will be brought to a point. An abstract concept of mathematics. There is no need to seperate our conceptions of the two.

And why isn't our understanding of existence infinite? We speak of it through language, no? We have rules of recursion which allow for an infinite possibility of combinations to express thoughts through finite number of terms.

The infinite is a much larger part of life than I think many people notice.

If you believe in science than mathematics is the universe. Nothing more, nothing less.

But where does the point come from? If we were a simulation, there would have to be a starting point somewhere, and if this is a real universe or if there is a real universe out there, and if it did actually start somewhere rather than being a perpetual force, what started it?

And if there is no one there to record the point, does it actually exist? For all we know, the universe could be a collective hallucination and there may be no reality at all. Perhaps the universe has ended and we are living in the afterlife.

I was watching some science channel documentary on Stephen Hawkings black hole theory and one of the physicists was talking about how there may actually be millions and millions of tiny black holes, and we may even have black holes in our brains, which is an outrageous idea, but still possible. They theorized that information might go through a black hole and then become dispersed, shattered into little pieces and thrown back into the universe. But if it doesn't, then where does it go? Hawkings theorized that information disappears in a black hole, which would implicate that there is indeed an ending and beginning.

[pornbooth]

Originally Posted by spectr (View Original Post)

hey... anyone remember when lopht was doing all those great rds hacks... shit was fucking comical... sorry just remembered it and thought about all the fun back in the day...

the hack rfp wrote scripts for? mad nt web servers got owned with that shit. wu-ftp was also remotely exploitable 24/7 in those days, gH bind exploits, to name a few others. i can honestly say i havnt done anything security-wise since 2000; with all this patriot act shit i bet network traffic monitering is nuts. or is it?

[lord_casek]

haha.....it is.

i'm still waiting for the right time to bring up boxing

[.coma]

The Singularity

Human history has been characterized by an accelerating rate of
technological progress. It is caused by a positive feedback loop.
A new technology, such as agriculture, allows an increase in population.
A larger population has more brains at work, so the next technology
is developed or discovered more quickly. In more recent times,
larger numbers of people are liberated from peasant-level agriculture
into professions that entail more education. So not only are there
more brains to think, but those brains have more knowledge to work
with, and more time to spend on coming up with new ideas.

We are still in the transition from mostly peasant-level agriculture
(most of the world's population is in un-developed countries), but the
fraction of the world considered 'developed' is constantly expanding.
So we expect the rate of technological progress to continue to accelerate
because there are more and more scientists and engineers at work.

Assume that there are fundamental limits to how far technology
can progress. These limits are set by physical constants such as
the speed of light and Planck's constant. Then we would expect that
the rate of progress in technology will slow down as these limits are
approached. From this we can deduce that there will be some time
(probably in the future) at which technological progress will be at
it's most rapid. This is a singular event in the sense that it happens
once in human history, hence the name 'Singularity'.

This is my definition of the concept. Vernor Vinge, in his series
of stories 'The Peace War' and 'Marooned in Real Time' had a different
definition. He implicitly assumed that there was no limit to how
far technology could progress, or that the limit was very very high.
The pace of progress became very rapid, and then at some point
mankind simply disappeared in some mysterious way. It is implied that
they ascended to the next level of existence or something. From the
point of view of the 20th century, mankind had become incomprehensively
different. So that time horizon when we can no longer say anything
useful about the future is Vinge's Singularity. One would expect
that his version of the Singularity would recede in time as time
goes by, i.e. the horizon moves with us.

When will the Singularity Occur?

The short answer is that the near edge of the Singularity is due about
the year 2035 AD. Several lines of reasoning point to this date. One
is simple projection from human population trends. Human population
over the past 10,000 years has been following a hyperbolic growth trend.
Since about 1600 AD the trend has been very steadily accelerating with
the asymptote located in the year 2035 AD. Now, either the human
population really will become infinite at that time (more about that
later), or a trend that has persisted over all of human history will
be broken. Either way it is a pretty special time.

If population growth slows down and the population levels off, then
we would expect the rate of progress to level off, then slow down as
we approach physical limits built into the universe. There's just one
problem with this naive expectation - it's the thing you are probably
staring at right now - the computer.

Computers aren't terribly smart right now, but that's because the
human brain has about a million times the raw power of todays' computers.
Here's how you can figure the problem: 10^11 neurons with 10^3 synapses
each with a peak firing rate of 10^3 Hz makes for a raw bit rate of
10^17 bits/sec. A 66 MHz processor chip with 64 bit architecture has
a raw bit rate of 4.2x10^9. You can buy about 100 complete PC's for
the cost of one engineer or scientist, so about 4x10^11 bits/sec, or
about a factor of a millionless than a human brain.

Since computer capacity doubles every two years or so, we expect that
in about 40 years, the computers will be as powerful as human brains.
And two years after that, they will be twice as powerful, etc. And
computer production is not limited by the rate of human reproduction.
So the total amount of brain-power available, counting humans plus
computers, takes a rapid jump upward in 40 years or so. 40 years
from now is 2035 AD.

Can the Singularity be avoided?

There are a couple of ways the Singularity might be avoided. One
is if there is a hard limit to computer power that is well below the
human-equivalent level. Well below means like a factor of 1000
below. If, for example, computer power were limited to only a
factor of 100 short of human capacity, then you could cram 100 CPU
chips in a box and get the power you wanted. And you would then
concentrate on automating the chip production process to get the
cost down. Current photolithography techniqes seem to be good
for a factor of 50 improvement over today's chips (maybe a real
expert can correct this figure for me if I am off). So it seems
that we need at least one major process change before the Singularity
and maybe it doesn't exist.

Another way to possibly avoid the Singularity is by humans messing
themselves up sufficiently. The argument goes that the work involved
in killing people is roughly constant over time, but the energy
and wealth available to each person goes up over time. So it becomes
easier over time for small numbers of people to kill ever larger
numbers of people. Then, given a small but finite rate of loonies
bent on mass murder, you eventually kill off large numbers of people
and set things back.

The usual technologies pointed to are nuclear weapons and engineered
plagues. One can describe scenarios like the hobbyist mad scientist
of the future extracting Uranium from sea-water (where it is present
in a few parts per billion), and then separating the U-235 with a
home mass-spectrometer, and building a bomb with his desktop milling
machine. It all is designed on his 'SuperCAD version 9.0' design
software.

Some Other Interesting Thresholds

Human life expectancies have been increasing at about 0.1 years
per calendar year. If the rate of progress in medical areas increases
by a factor of 10, then life expectancy will be increasing as fast
as you are aging. This means your projected lifespan suddenly jumps
from being in the mid to upper 80 year range to a much larger number.
From my point of view as a 36 year old, biotechnology is making
gratifyingly rapid progress even today, and I hope that this will feed
jumps in life expectancy in the future.

Whether the size of a factory or a Drexler-style assembler, the complexity
of a self-replicating machine is probably about constant. At some point
we will have tools capable of modeling and designing such machines, and
shortly therafter building them. A finite investment in building the
first such machine will yield an exponentially expanding output. This
has radical consequences for wealth levels, etc. Even nearly self-
replicating machines (say 99% capable) will have dramatic economic
effects.

[fermentor666]

Maybe the singularity will birth artificial intelligence and maybe AI is actually the next step in human evolution. Or maybe AI will outlast humans as mammals outlasted the dinosaurs. Or make us extinct.

Personally, I do not rule out the possibility that cognizant life can form out of the internet. Call me crazy, but right now we still don't how life or intelligence was created, so it is still theoretically possible that self-aware intelligence can be created within our technology without our knowledge. Sort of like the movie "Colossus: The Forbin Project" or "Wargames". For all we know, there could be something out there right now, living in cyberspace.

Where did you copy that singularity article from? Who wrote it?

[.coma]

^ Dani Eder. whoever that is.


excelent point btw, but the fundamental flaw with producing sentient life has been choice/emotion.

whilst machines may capable of 1000^ the power of the human brain, their reasoning is limited to cold-hard logic.

and that's the basic conflict between good/evil that has gone on since the dawn of man.

[NoeWhan]

Hackers should be like Gary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PkNPCEnJM

[fermentor666]

Originally Posted by .coma (View Original Post)

^ Dani Eder. whoever that is.


excelent point btw, but the fundamental flaw with producing sentient life has been choice/emotion.

whilst machines may capable of 1000^ the power of the human brain, their reasoning is limited to cold-hard logic.

and that's the basic conflict between good/evil that has gone on since the dawn of man.

But that's the thing, life itself spawned out of cold, hard logic, assuming there was a universe before there was life. Why couldn't it spawn out of a machine or the internet? I don't think it could spawn out of say, a toy robot or a car, but I like to think of the internet as this writhing mass of intelligence that may just need a spark to become aware.

[.coma]

one theory could be perspective. even as we converse, its still just text floating around and without a pov to base the info on, A.I is still limited to being a slightly more well constructed version of a dumb terminal.

furthermore, there is an article written by a former 0-09wtc employee who described a system designed by oracle that can give a situtational analysis for a multitude of real world "scenarios". think paycheck (minus the shitty acting)

the problem cited with these particular systems is usually some scenario in which all of humanities problems are solved in a nanosecond when "it" decides "we" need to "start over". add to the equation religious zelots begging for their version of the end and there you have the biggest hoax ever.








and im a baptist saying this......

[fermentor666]

Well, if self-aware intelligence could form out of cyberspace, it would have access to much of our planet's history. And as computers grow faster and faster, and networks faster and faster, then it could learn faster and faster.

[iloveboxcars]

Originally Posted by NoeWhan (View Original Post)

Hackers should be like Gary.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4PkNPCEnJM

why are these computers on the internet and not on an intranet?

i just dont understand why, if they wanted to keep this secret, they would make it all easily available. excuse my inner conspiracy theorist here, but it would be so simple for this to not happen that it is completely possible they want this information trickled out in this fashion. even if it is to just make more people feel helplessly under control.