Hm. It appears Blogspot ate my comments. So I guess I'll just paste it here.

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> The "for a time" bit is crucial. There is as Feynman said "plenty of room at the bottom" but it is by no means infinite given actually demonstrated physics. That means all growth curves that look exponential or more in the short run turn over and become S-curves or similar in the long run, unless we discover physics that we do not now know, as information and data processing under physics as we know it are limited by the number of particles we have access to, and that in turn can only increase in the long run by at most a cubic polynomial (and probably much less than that, since space is mostly empty).

Yes, but the fundamental limit is so ridiculously high that it might as well be infinite. Look at Seth Lloyd's bounds in http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/9908043 . He can be off by many orders of magnitude and still Moore's law will have many doublings to go.

(Incidentally, the only quasi-Singulitarian I am aware of who has claimed there will be an actual completed infinity is Frank Tipler, and as I understand it, his model required certain parameters like a closed universe which have since been shown to not be the case.)

> As for "the Singularity" as a point past which we cannot predict, the stock market is by this definition an ongoing, rolling singularity, as are most aspects of the weather, and many quantum events, and many other aspects of our world and society. And futurists are notoriously bad at predicting the future anyway, so just what is supposed to be novel about an unpredictable future?

WHAT. We have plenty of models of all of those events. The stock market has many predictable features (long-term appreciation of x% a year and fat-tailed volatility for example), and weather has even more (notice we're debating the long-term effects of global warming in the range of a few degrees like 0-5, and not, I dunno, 0-1,000,000). Our models are much better than the stupidest possible max-entropy guess. We can predict a hell of a lot.

The point of Vinge's singularity is that we can't predict past the spike. Will there be humans afterwards? Will there be anything? Will world economic growth rates and population shoot upwards as in Hanson's upload model? Will there be a singleton? Will it simply be a bust and humanity go on much as it always has except with really neat cellphones? Max-ent is our best guess; if we want to do any better, then we need to actively intervene and make our prediction more likely to be right.

> Even if there was such a thing as a "general intelligence" the specialized machines would soundly beat it in the marketplace. It would be very far from a close contest.

And the humans? If there is a niche for humans, that same niche is available to the general intelligence, and since it can be self-improving and graft on the specialized machines better than humans ever will, it ought to dominate.

The economic extinction of humanity? Seems like a Singularity to me. (The economy was driven by human desires before, but what do the machines compete for when the humans are gone? I certainly can't predict it.)

> Nor does the human mind, as flexible as it is, exhibit much in the way of some universal general intelligence. Many machines and many other creatures are capable of sensory, information-processing, and output feats that the human mind is quite incapable of.

And pray, how do we know of these feats? How were these machines constructed? (Whether I kill you with my bare hands or by firing a bullet, you are still dead.)

5678:

> The null hypothesis would be: there does not exist an algorithm and a computer which achieves the goals of AGI. I await the proof, or a modicum of scientific evidence to support this.

Shouldn't the null hypothesis be the Copernican hypothesis? - there is nothing special about humans.

Every success of AI, every human function done in software, is additional Bayesian evidence that there is nothing special about humans. If there were something special, one ought to observe endless failure, much like trying to trisect the angle or prove the parallel axiom; but instead, one observes remarkably rapid progress. (Where was chemistry after its first 60 years? Feel free to set your starting point anywhere from the earliest Chinese alchemists to after Robert Boyle.)

Kevembuangga:

> More to the point, some singularitarians pretend to have a definition of "Universal Intelligence" which curiously enough isn't computable. :-)

If you have an actual argument, please feel free to give it and not just engage in mockery.

Were you aware that uncomputable algorithms are useful and can easily be made computable?

(You can solve the Halting Problem for a Turing machine with bounded memory, for example. And every static analysis like type-checking, by Rice's theorem, is attempting something Turing-complete, but they're still not useless. When employing theorems, beware lest you prove something different from what you think you are proving.)