Really? I thought the article I linked to was an insightful discussion of the topic. e.g.: "For awhile yet, the general critics of machine sapience will have good press. After all, till we hgave hardware as powerful as a human brain it is probably foolish to think we'll be able to create human equivalent (or greater) intelligence. ... it's more likely that devising the software will be a tricky process, involving lots of false starts and experimentation. If so so, the arrival of self-aware machines will not happen till after the development of hardware that is substantially more powerful than humans' natural equipment." Etc. I would highly suggest reading it.

I think you're shifting the goalposts a bit here and not responding to what I actually said. I said that it is magical thinking to believe that "human-type intelligence is unique and can never be replicated, simulated, or surpassed."

For one thing, I think it is possible that human-level intelligence has evolved elsewhere. I don't see why we would have to be unique.

Secondly, I don't know how to define consciousness, and I don't know how to define it in an artificial context. I don't know if consciousness is necessary for intelligence.

I also don't know how long transistors will be our top computing technology? I guess we're within a decade of no longer being able to shrink circuitry, as we are close to coming up on physical boundaries that we don't know a way around. I have never claimed that silicon chips are going to to lead to superintelligence or that LLMS are going to lead to superintelligence.

What I do know is that it's an unimaginably massive universe out there. To me, it seems foolhardy to make claims that something can never happen. We are barely a century into the electric age. We are well under a century into the era of integrated circuits. Who knows what comes next? I don't feel comfortable saying "never" in that context!

I also know that exponential change is intuitively difficult to understand.

If billions of years of evolution can produce a human brain, why can't we simulate one? If not now, in 100 years? 500 years? 10,000 years?

Hah. That too. Then again, I think the last Apple commercial I actually remember is the dancing iPod silhouettes. Or Ellen Feiss (beep beep beep beep beep)? Do they even make commercials any more?

I have not followed it very closely, but there seems to be some strong progress in getting LLMs involved in decompilation. Nothing may be safe!

When you just make stuff up and argue against a strawman, it becomes awfully easy to win arguments.

The term "singularity" used in a technological sense goes back to the early days of computing--Von Neumann (this was news to me!). Interestingly, in 1993 NASA held a conference on "cyberspace" and future issues. https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/3001391. Link to the paper https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19940022855/downloads/19940022855.pdf

Vernor Vinge:

Let's see..1993 + 30 = 2023. A few months after ChatGPT 3.5 was released! A funny coincidence (or not?), and nobody would claim that ChatGPT is superhuman, but Vinge was on point. You might read the article, it's (deliberately) provocative, but it's interesting.

You frequently accuse those you disagree with of magical thinking. IMHO, the real magical thinking is the belief that human-type intelligence is unique and can never be replicated, simulated, or surpassed.

AI growth has more or less tracked computing capacity over the decades. I'm excited to see what comes next.

What hubris!

Knuth: "Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it."

Here's an ACM article on the epistemology of bugs: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3662730

What's your definition of "insight"?

Why would anyone want to work for a company that does stuff like this??

My recollection of the Heinlein version was that service was a requirement of voting and the government had to bend things for people with limitations... But he may have approached the theme in various ways in various books.

The version I would favor would have involve options, but the length of time would vary to balance things out. If they want more people in the military, then they shorten the time period until they attract more people. However I'm not sure if that approach would lead to mathematical convergence or divergence...

Quoted against the censor mods. On the substance, I won't be surprised if the main result is a bunch of "Your check must be in the mail" lawsuits from companies waiting for the check...

But that may be a side effect of reading Facebook about another CEO who doesn't seem so nice?

You piqued my curiosity, but not enough to do a bunch of reading on the lack of clarity...

However I will say that I think there is a kind of creativity which involves combining older ideas in new ways.

Sorry, but no more time just now, so I guess this should be filed under "mostly an ACK".

Z^-1

Mostly the ACK, but perhaps my personal problem that I have not been interested in any of those three stories, though I may have read a book version of Jurassic Park... I'm pretty sure I've seen a book called "The Godfather" and that the cover said it was related to the movie, and I can't recall any book version of Fight Club. I'm not sure if it matters, but were these books written before or after the movies? My thesis would be that a seminal book will get squeezed when it becomes a movie, but going the other way it will be hard for the book based on the movie to expand the ideas and stay on script, so to speak.

I don't watch many movies. Never watched many, and far fewer lately. However I am unable to recall an example of a movie that I thought was better than the book. Most often I felt like the movie eliminated many of the imaginative possibilities of the book. Largely a matter of bandwidth? Movies flood the zone, filling both the visual and audio channels and requiring almost all of your mental capacity to keep up. More so as the effects have become more special and dazzling. For books you have to do most of the mental work yourself and I think that's a fundamentally healthy kind of mental exercise.

Do you have some movie in mind that you think was better than the book?

It kind of feels to me like it's hard to get excited about things these days? I mean that if you think a particular breakthrough is cool, well you didn't consider problems X or Y. And it was done better, by Z. And it's going to destroy the environment. And people on the opposite side of the political spectrum like it, so that's a problem too. Etc.

I'm not sure if we're really in an unusually negative-thinking period if history, or if it just feels that way to me, in the current political climate, in my own state of life, etc.

Either way, as a GenXer it's kind of relaxing! Back to the days when caring about things was SO not cool. ;-)

David Brin is a science fiction author who wrote a collection of books in the "Uplift" universe. The 30-second summary is that there are countless sentient species around the universe and a galactic civilization spanning billions of years. before humanity was discovered, no known example of evolution creating advanced intelligence was ever discovered. Instead, superior advanced species "uplifted" primitive species to be intelligent through gene modification, selective breeding, etc.

One of the species in the book was kind of a like an organic wheel chair that had evolved in a close-to-weightless environment--short stub legs to accelerate and hardened wheel-like structures with some kind of magnetism involved.

Very interesting books and very creative in exploring just how different evolution in radically different environments might be.