Half of the facts are wrong may be a little steep. Do we breathe air? Does it contain oxygen? I'm sure some enthusiast will give me the composition of air (inc some stat on nitrogen:). There are many trivial facts that we know with confidence.
However, in a recent conversation with my mother, I asked her about a talking donkey in the bible. she confirmed the reference saying "the lord works in mysterious ways" and "donkeys could talk back then". Maybe there is some truth that 1/2 of our facts are wrong... If you skip religion, I view my mother as a very clever woman who is very astute with business. She was indoctrinated at a young age.
Talking donkey is described as a miracle, meaning donkeys weren't used to talk even back then :) Miracles by definition are unscientific, unpredictable, unreproducible and contrary to all our previous experience.
But leaving donkeys aside, we are not usually thinking with extreme scientific rigor, because that would be too expensive and, frankly, wasteful. Frequently heuristics - also known as cognitive biases, prejudices, etc. - serve as well enough for everyday life. Of course, sometimes you need much better precision and then you have to know how to do it.
Religion is just one form of worldview or belief system.
Everyone has a worldview/belief system, no matter how scientific they are.
An belief systems are non-rational. These are the default nodes in your cognitive framework. They aren't evaluated, they are just assumed to be facts. They aren't easily changeable. For anyone, no matter how good they are at reasoning.
The point is that regardless of the basis of the worldview, those underlying fact nodes in the cognitive framework are terminal nodes. There isn't any rationalization that goes on to reevaluate them, except under very rare circumstances which aren't motivated by a rational process.
No, I'm claiming that the idea that progress toward this can be predicted and that the event will occur around 2045 is a religious idea.
Like all of the best religious ideas, it is one that came about by a man faced with his own mortality.
On a side note, and this is opening a huge philosophical can of worms, I'm not convinced of the utility in merging our intelligence to machine intelligence in such a scenario, either from the point of view of overall utility (what do they gain from our meeker intelligence?) or from the point of view of our own "existence" actually being near-immortalized.
Stated simply, if you could make a perfect copy of my brain into a 20 year old clone of myself (I'm 39) and that clone were created such that it didn't have to worry about issues like telomere shortening or any of the other processes theorized to cause issues for clones, but after the process was completed the original copy of me would be terminated, I wouldn't take that deal and I doubt many other people would either regardless of how they feel about the theoretical ability to duplicate an exact copy of their own consciousness. Ultimately, the copy of me that is me wants to continue on but cannot.
While I agree that you will die, the rest is claptrap. There's nothing religious about the singularity.
We are most definitely not hard wired for religion. It's a mythology that preceded the scientific era. In a thousand years or less it will be laughed off like the talking donkey nonsense. We're not hard wired at all...
We're not hardwired for something as abstract as religion, but we do have a lot of cognitive heuristics and biases that while they may have had uses in the ancestral environment (and indeed some today), nevertheless make errors in reasoning such as religion (and homeopathy, judging risks and probabilities, reducing fractions, etc.) quite easy for even the most intelligent of us. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases
I agree there's little that's religious about the Singularity itself or most Singularitarians (http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/steven/?p=21), and the above poster is probably mislead about it. (I suspect he's mislead because he brought up the 2045 date and because he's confused about identity. That date I believe is only professed strongly by Kurzweil in the public mediasphere, who is at most with respect to the Singularity a predictor with some past successes and equipped with a strong argument based on accelerated returns, but he isn't working directly toward a positive (or negative) Singularity while those who are that I'm aware of hesitate to estimate date ranges.) Personally I think barring mass human extinction the stage is set for a Singularity event within this century, and I do have many justifications for it, not a religious "I have faith and faith is good" 'justification' or an apologetic one trying to extract justification by means of some shaky philosophy and an a priori sacred book (Singularity is Near? Never read it) containing no significant errors.
I see the Singularity as an apocalyptic prophecy, textbook millenarianism [1] that takes much inspiration from old-school Marxism. Like the latter, it presents itself as economic and scientific because it has big-sounding concepts like Law of Accelerating Returns [2] / Law of Accelerating Misery; both seem well reasoned, are slick, intelligent, and easy for smart people to believe in.
Now, Marx couldn't think of politics as independent from the interests of the capitalist class. That's why he failed, as Popper described: the New Deal, Social Security, public and subsidized education, progressive taxation... all those things came and made his prophecy fail. As in hindsight was to be expected, if only because prophecies rarely become true.
Today, Kurzweil can't think of biology as the vast, incredibly complex area that it is, and so his prophecy will fail when it's clear how difficult it is to achieve immortality, or full cybernetisation of the human mind, or general AI, or whatever. I am 90% confident in that outcome.
Yeah, we are not hard wired for religion, but still it's very easy to fall for it. Scientific reasoning is not and probably never will be the norm, if simply for the fact that we're just poor dumb chimps. After all, religion didn't stop appearing after 1900. The Scientologists are proof of that.
[2] LOAR forgets how Moore's law, for example, was very specific and probably short-term. If Kurzweil had been born in the 19th century, he would have probably been talking about the coming Steam Engine Singularity. In the 60s, he'd be talking about scientific bases on Mars by 2000...
Do you have any links to peer-reviewed journal articles that conclude beyond any possible doubt that we're not hard-wired in any way for religion? If not, do you believe it simply because it's a comforting assertion that fits in well with your world view? And isn't believing something without evidence simply because it's comforting rather...religious?
What I thought "singularity" meant is merely that eventually human work will become worthless as easy to replicate machines will be more intelligent.
I agree that predicting when it would happen is somewhat silly. Also, I had no idea that "merging" humans into machines had anything to do with the singularity.
If you just take the notion that eventually AI will surpass human intelligence, I think it is a very reasonable idea.
And on top of that I'm claiming that the singularity will never happen.
We have incredibly fast computers with enormous amounts of memory, yet are no closer to AI.
And even given infinite computing power, we still wouldn't have AI, so the race for computing power is a red herring. (It's not like we know how to do it, but the computers are not powerful enough - we don't have the slightest clue how make AI.)
(I define AI as the ability to learn any topic at all with unstructured instruction - like reading a book, or being told verbally. Additionally after learning the material an AI must be able to invent and synthesize new material from the old.)
And on top of that computers aren't getting any faster, that's basically stopped. (Although if AI is parallelizable it might not matter.)
> We have incredibly fast computers with enormous amounts of memory, yet are no closer to AI.
Supercomputers today are the equivalent of a tractor - they do simple things that people can do but at a greater scale. Nobody ever looked at the first tractor and claimed it was a step towards better AI, and nor should they when they look at supercomputers.
> And on top of that I'm claiming that the singularity will never happen
You'll get a lot of negative replies about this, after all HN is very pro-Singularity or however you want to call it, but my gut feeling is that you're right.
I can see Moore's law being applied successfully for the next 100 years in one form or another (more processing cores, quantum computing finally taking off etc.), enough for us to reach a state where we could say "Mission accomplished" and let the machines do our job, but I cannot imagine, not even in the remotest of ways, how AI humor would sound like, meaning how would the machines make jokes. In fact, that would be my "personal" Turing-test for deciding that the Singularity has truly arrived: can the machines understand and perpetuate humor?
More and more functions that were once human-only are now a machine capability. Intelligently playing games, voice recognition, image recognition, and some (though this is still undergoing intensive research) working with natural language.
I really really don't see how you can believe that humans will forever be more intelligent than machines. What makes humans so special? Why would you believe that?
However, in a recent conversation with my mother, I asked her about a talking donkey in the bible. she confirmed the reference saying "the lord works in mysterious ways" and "donkeys could talk back then". Maybe there is some truth that 1/2 of our facts are wrong... If you skip religion, I view my mother as a very clever woman who is very astute with business. She was indoctrinated at a young age.