Tag: singularity

Intelligence is exponentially hard

there’s only a runaway effect if creating intelligences is a linear problem: 2x as intelligent is 2x as hard. it is much more likely it is an exponentially hard problem.

2023-02-11: A similar argument, there may be diminishing returns to intelligence

For most problems in the universe, there are massive diminishing returns to intelligence, either because they are too easy or too hard. We are obsessed with the narrow band of things that some humans can do and others can’t, like graduate from college, or at the extremes what is feasible for a genius of 160 IQ but not a regular smart person at 120, like write a great novel or make a discovery in theoretical physics. But the category of things that either all humans can do or no humans can do is probably larger than the one of things that some humans can do and not others.

The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears

If a single celled micro-organism is more complex than our simulations of neurons, that makes me suspect that our simulations aren’t yet right. Or, finally, consider 3 more discoveries we’ve made in recent years about how the brain works, none of which are included in current brain simulations. First, there’re glial cells. Glial cells outnumber neurons in the human brain. And traditionally we’ve thought of them as ‘support’ cells that just help keep neurons running. But new research has shown that they’re also important for cognition. Yet the Blue Gene simulation contains none. Second, very recent work has shown that, sometimes, neurons that don’t have any synapses connecting them can actually communicate. The electrical activity of one neuron can cause a nearby neuron to fire (or not fire) just by affecting an electric field, and without any release of neurotransmitters between them. This too is not included in the Blue Brain model.

Mitochondrial outsourcing

Genetically, the mitochondrion has lost all but a handful of its 4000 bacterial genes, down to 37 in humans. Over many generations, the mitochondria outsource their genes to the nucleus. Is this starting to sound familiar? We have been outsourcing our intelligence, and our humanity, to machines for centuries. As we invent each new computer task, we define it away as not “really” human. The real question is, what will be the essential human thing left that we contribute to the machines we inhabit?

Pink Noise

Leonid Korogodski’s publishing debut Pink Noise: A Posthuman Tale is a dense, hard-sf novella that takes a serious crack at imagining the priorities, miseries and joys of posthuman people. It’s a tall order: creating believably nonhuman post-people means that you necessarily give up on a certain amount of empathy and sympathy for your characters who are, by definition, doing things whose motivations we can’t purely understand.