gipat: переводы

→If you've come to the decision that sentiment must go, here's how to start.

→...What was that about being in a simulation?

→We are designed to use the relevant matrix to our stage of biological neurological development and our abilities. All of these should develop in synchrony. As a baby, your ability is not at first sufficient for you to feed yourself; you need a matrix which will do that for you. As a teenager, you need a matrix that will fulfill your other, different needs, and so on. If our abilities do not develop as they should (because of insufficient or erroneous input) biological development goes right on ahead anyway, we don't have the required abilities to make a shift and we get stuck in a matrix.

→The concept of 'intelligent life' is a grave misnomer, if one cannot have life without intelligence. Intelligence is the software program behind all life on earth, self-modifying software which improves itself and redesigns its own hardware to form an ever more efficient matrix to further develop in. It does not need consciousness or intellect and its beginnings are inherent in the nature of all matter, observable as replication in clays and minerals (the organization and movement of information through matter) before it ever gets as far as organic molecules. Organic soup provides a richer template for its activities, with planta and photosynthesis (the organization and movement of information through energy) and it is the program that forms the molecules of DNA as the building blocks of all organic life, through animals with kinetic abilities (the organization & movement of information through space) and humans, with language encapsulating memory (the organization & movement of information through time). Intelligence is a natural emergent of matter and energy, as surely as salt is a natural emergent of sodium and chlorine.

→Emotion adjusting: Refile, edit, erase, write, encrypt, disable or enable.

→IA & Emergence

→Uploading is defined by most as either "replacing the actions of brain cells with exact mechanical (nano) copies", or "moving the functions of the physical brain onto a non-biological platform". Various ways of doing this have been suggested, and the concept has become allied to the study of AI for obvious reasons. Unfortunately we are not likely to get very far with either until we find out exactly what it is we need to reproduce, how it works, and how it goes wrong. If a model for Artificial Intelligence is taken from most current human brains we will end up with Artificial Dysfunctional Intelligence, which is of little use to anybody, including itself.

→Tied in with the 'singularity' concept, is the possibility of life extension or even human immortality. There are many different methods suggested to achieve this. Cryonics is the technique of preserving tissue at low temperatures for future use (in organ transplants) or possible revival and repair (in whole humans or their brains.) It will probably sneak in sideways as a technique for enabling the brain to survive for longer during operations and so on, because big headway is being made in this direction. Nanotechnology is looked upon by some as the upcoming savior of humanity in itself, suggesting possibilities as wide ranging as massive cheap food production, biological repair & replacement, disease prevention and uploading. Bionics & Cyborgisation tie in with this, because nanotech would be the optimal way to achieve it. AI is hailed by many as the potential savior of our times. All of these fields are covered extensively in other works and I’m not going to go into them here.

→The single thing I feel confident of is that these emerging technological trajectories will start their visible run up the right-hand side of the graph within 10 or 20 years, and by 2030 (or 2050 at latest) will have put everything we hold self-evident into question. We will live forever; or we will all perish most horribly; our minds will emigrate to cyberspace, and start the most ferocious overpopulation race ever seen on the planet; or our machines will Transcend and take us with them, or leave us in some peaceful backwater where the meek shall inherit the Earth. Or something else, something far weirder and... unimaginable. Don't blame me. That's what I promised you."

→Despite possible impediments to the arrival of the Spike, I suggest that while it might be delayed, almost certainly it's not going to be halted. If anything, the surging advances I see every day coming from labs around the world convince me that we already are racing up the lower slopes of its curve into the incomprehensible. In short, it makes little sense to try to pin down the future. Too many strange changes are occurring already, with more lurking just out of sight, ready to leap from the equations and surprise us. True AI, when it occurs, might rush within days or months to SI (superintelligence), and from there into a realm of beings whose motives and plans we can't even start to second-guess. Nanotechnology could go feral or worse, used by crackpots or statesmen to squelch their foes and rapidly smear us all into paste. Or sublime AIs might use it to the same end, recycling our atoms into better living through femtotechnology.

→Is that strictly true? There are some negative constraints we can feel fairly confident about. The sheer reliability and practical effectiveness of quantum theory, and the robust way relativity holds up under strenuous challenge, argues that they will remain at the core of future science--in some form, which is rather baffling, since at the deepest levels they disagree with each other about what kind of cosmos we inhabit. In other words, we do already know a great deal, a tremendous amount, corroborated knowledge will not go away.

→Thirty something years on, we see that this increased pace of change is going to disrupt the nature of humanity as well, due to the emergence of a new kind of mind: AIs (artificial intelligences). With self-bootstrapping minds abruptly arrived in the world, able to enhance and rewrite their own cognitive and affective coding in seconds, science will no longer be restricted to the slow, limited apertures granted by human senses (however augmented by wonderful instruments) and sluggish brains (however glorious by the standards of other animals). We'll find ourselves, Vinge suggests, in a world where nothing much can be predicted reliably.

→The impact of that distressing but apparently free-floating prediction is much greater than you might imagine. In 1970, Alvin Toffler had already grasped the notion of accelerating change. In Future Shock he noted: New discoveries, new technologies, new social arrangements in the external world erupt into our lives in the form of increased turnover rates--shorter and shorter relational durations. They force a faster and faster pace of daily life.' This is the very definition of future shock'.

→The acceleration of technological progress has been the central feature of [the 20th] century. I argue in this paper that we are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. The precise cause of this change is the imminent creation by technology of entities with greater than human intelligence.

→While Vinge first advanced his insight in works of imaginative fiction, he has featured it more rigorously in such formal papers as his address to the VISION-21 Symposium, sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993. He opened that paper with the following characteristic statement:

→This important notion has been described metaphorically--both in science fiction and in serious essays--as a technological Singularity. That term is due to Professor Vernor Vinge, a mathematician and novelist formerly in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, San Diego State University (although a few others had anticipated the insight). The term "singularity" tied to the notion of radical change is very evocative,' Vinge says, adding: I used the term "singularity" in the sense of a place where a model of physical reality fails.' In mathematics, singularities arise when quantities go infinite; in cosmology, a black hole is the physical, literal expression of that relativistic effect.

→"I wish I could show you the real future, in detail, just the way it's going to unfold. In fact, I wish I knew its shape myself. But the unreliability of trends is due precisely to relentless, unpredictable change, which makes the future interesting but also renders it opaque.

→I have already sung the praises of writers, and I now hand over the page to one of my favorites, Damien Broderick...His view of "the singularity" and related concepts is amply expressed in his own non-fiction works "The Last Mortal Generation" and "The Spike". Here's another peach.R56

→The Singularity is a favorite future scenario for M4s, who still confuse intellect with intelligence and who, when they say 'AI', actually mean Artificial Intellect, in the context of matrix theory. It is possible that increasing intellect may lead to an increase in intelligence, but it is just as likely that increasing imagination may, too. There are many people on this planet with very high IQs who are, despite them, incredibly stupid, but information as intellect is still valuable because for those who have the rest of a working brain, it can be the real icing on the cake. Intellect (and imagination) in the service of intelligence is the only way we are really going to increase intelligence.

→While some believe the Singularity will occur on a certain date, similar to a divinely ordained Judgment Day or Armageddon, the truth is that there has always been a moving ‘Singularity’ of sorts. Before the 1970s, few people predicted the ways computers would change everyday life in the industrialized world by 2000. Even in 2004, most long-term predictions about the environment fail to take into account the effects of technology developed to address the very problems being predicted. (When people try to fix a problem they think is worth fixing, they usually succeed. Many people living on Earth think the Earth becoming uninhabitable would be a problem worth fixing.) Likewise, even if we do get much smarter as predicted, our increased intelligence will let us see further into the future, thus pushing the Singularity back. We always know at least a little bit about what lies ahead, even if it is not as much as we would like."