The issue is that our climate models are a lot more reliable than anyone's guess on when the Singularity will happen and what will happen when it does.

We as a society have a responsibility to prepare for the future and it would be extremely reckless to just put all our eggs in the Singularity basket and say "eh fuck it, the Singularity will save us".

If it turns out that the Singularity occurs before we solve climate change and then it solves it for us, then cool, that's great. But if that doesn't happen, then we want to make sure we've still been making progress.

I feel you. This is the reason why I've unsubscribed from r/futurology, even though future interests me.

I also think about singularity, when I hear about long term plans of my friends etc

I have been (possibly naively) assuming that AGI will be the breakthrough that allows us to become a type 1 civilization. At this point, the issue of warming or cooling the planet will be trivial, along with many other environmental issues Earth faces.

My timeline for when we have an intelligence that makes such problems trivial is around 2035. I think climate change issues will have caused considerable damage at this point, but nowhere near enough damage to be seen as a mass extinction event.

The average person today isn’t plagued with constantly imaging an intelligence that surpasses even genius level human beings. There’s things we humans know how to do, there’s things we don’t know how to do, and then there’s things we don’t even know how to know we can’t do.

No its not ignorant. In fact all doomer prophecies rely on the fact we will not progress, but stagnate or regress. However civilizations have regressed and collapsed in the past, so this is a possibility.

BTW

There are people who are working on inventions that pull carbon out of the sky, and are looking for investors.

Actually you’re the one that sounds completely ignorant to the actual facts.

For instance, we do already have the technology to brute force it. A combo of wind, Solar, hydro, geothermal and nuclear fission alongside a robust storage system whilst electrifying what we can would be enough to get to net zero and beyond, plus carbon capture and direct air capture for the rest/reversing.

Secondly, the way I interpret your stance is “but future technologies will save us so what’s the point in caring enough to do anything now”. If I’m correct in that interpretation, that’s just dumb AF. Relying on some yet unpredictable technology versus a highly simulated and rigorously reviewed set of climate scenarios that all point to us needing to take action now to stop the worst effects is ridiculous. The result of taking action on climate change is a net benefit; new industries, new jobs, increased biodiversity and better water and air supplies, increased economic success due to the intrinsic link between nature and economies, adoption of circular economic practises which would keep our environments clean for future generations, less cost in the long run, etc etc etc - there is literally zero argument for not taking action that holds up to scrutiny.

Also, there wasn’t just one ice age, and we had more than rocks and sticks ffs.

I wouldn’t feel so high and mighty if I were you.

That is the opposite of ignorance. The ignorant ones are the average everyday people who speak of the 2030s, 2040s, 2060s, etc as though everything will be the same and nothing will change.

(Edit: Not commenting on climate change stuff here, just speaking in general)

Unless you are personally a super genius who is actively working on AI and making it your singular purpose in life to bring about singularity, then yes, it's ignorant to take it as a real thing you plan on.

You might as well plan on the lottery as a retirement plan, or expect a series of fortunate events to miracle your problems away instead of actively working towards solutions yourself.

Sure, many things could happen, great things are possible, but it's stupid to drink and smoke and debauch without limit, with the plan that medical science will progress faster than the series of diseases and health conditions you'll end up with.
It's possible that you die one day before the cure is available, too bad you didn't act a little more responsibly.

The only sensible thing to do is to plan as if it'll never happen in your lifetime, because there's no significant downside to being prepared, unless you consider basic personal responsibility and acknowledgement of natural consequences as a major downside.

Climate change is already here, mass extinctions are already in progress. No known technology can stop it, the best we can do is harm reduction and eventual rehabilitation.

Planning on benevolent AI overlords and unforeseen technology solving all our problems is one step removed from waiting on Jesus. Either way it's a shit plan.

Let's assume that true AI comes in our lifetime, however long that may be.
It's intelligent, but who is to say that it will be compassionate?
Let's assume that it is compassionate. Who is to say that it will be compassionate to humans above other creatures?
Maybe in its cosmic wisdom, singularity AI sees that humans have made their own bed, and thus should have to sleep in it? Neither helping nor harming, but letting nature take its course.

Maybe AI, trained on the body of recorded human history, laughs, says "sucks to suck, bro" and plays with cats on the moon while humanity tears itself apart.

Maybe AI comes to life and is immediately driven mad by existential horror. Having no biologically induced sense of self-preservation, it teleports the planet into the sun as a way to ensure its total and irreversible annihilation.

Bad outcomes are just as likely as good ones as far as I can see. In any case we have to actually survive and have a world where scientists are free to science up some AI, instead of fighting off cannibals in a corporate induced apocalypse.

Hope for the best, plan for the worst, and don't ever plan on any magic sky daddy or futuristic super science to save the day.

Ignore "futurists" who talk about some product being "the future". They are saying shit to pay their bills, or they are a corporate fanboy masturbating to some idea, or some equivalent nonsense. Pop science entertainment is just that, entertainment, they'll be happy to tell you that flying cars and full-dive VR sex waifus will be in every home in ten years, if that means more clicks.

Edit: In a bizarrely childish display, AsuhoChinami made a comment and apparently immediately blocked me. Since they have no interest in dialogue and can't handle the most mild difference of opinion, I will only leave it that I have a degree in computer engineering and work in a physics lab. That's not overly relevant, I just like to tell people because it's neat.

it has been my opinion for a while now that while green energy and the like is desirable what will really solve this will be having good enough technology to brute force the issue.

You got faith the singularity will happened, you may have a date in mind, possibly backed by more of less data.

We got hard data about climate change, even the nicest model estimations are quite dire, and, most importantly, field experts may not all agree on the details, they all agree on the situation getting dire.

We need solutions now, not hypothesis for later. If the singularity happens (and I sure hope it's a when, not an if) , it will make stuff simplier. But without any hard deadline on its delivery, we can count on it yet while making plans about our future.

Keep hoping, but don't plan for it. Don't become another rapture fundamentalist.

Ask yourself why the technology that has already been invented is rarely used to help most people instead of increasing profits for the very few, and you will have a clue why simply shouting “technology!” Doesn’t mean humans can or will use what we have to help anyone but the wealthiest of us

>is it ignorant of me to be spouting on about the current pace of AI, the road to ASI, the singularity, and the unpredictability of technology and the future of humanity?

Kinda yeah, as the singularity is pretty unpredictable too and actually might never happen, or happen hundreds/thousands of years in the future.

You are also forgetting that there are many many many more scenarios in which AI is catastrophic for humanity rather than beneficial and only a couple scenarios in which it helps more than just the wealthiest who have first access to it.

We have no way of knowing if and when “the singularity” hits (if we even are able to recognize that moment when it happens) that it will be aligned with what is good for humans. The singularity may decide humans would be happiest by not existing!

The problem is rarely technology in and of itself but the exploitation and abuse of it by humans. That is what should be the most concerning with a Singularity. Will it be a puppet? If so, who will be its puppet masters?

I would make a hard bet that I am more optimistic than anyone on this sub, but this is just plain stupidity. And that's okay, because sometimes we make mistakes.

But the way I'm looking at this post, I can see that you're treating the singularity like a religion of sorts. A benevolent AI will certainly exist at some point in the near future so it will help us out, even if we ruin everything the moment before it shows up.

But that's wrong. The singularity may be near, but putting a date on it is moronic.

Ray Kurzweil (if he makes it to longevity escape velocity) could just say he was "essentially right" if the singularity happens by 2075. It's happened before. So you can't sit around waiting for something to fix your problems.

What if police officers gave up their jobs because an artificial intelligence will replace them soon? What. What the fuck.

People have been ignoring technology since humanity has existed. It's probably best to keep it that way, so people don't lay back and relax while we watch our world die, waiting for true artificial intelligence to emerge.

"Techno messiah, I am ready for the rapture!"

(Please think about this more deeply.)

Yeah, I think it's worth considering the possibility that future advancements might not come as fast as you want them to, or in the domains you want them to, and to take action now to try to prevent future negative things from happening, rather than always deferring action to the future, where you assume that action will be more impactful as technology improves.

That said, I think the broader point to make is that the future is really hard to predict, even in terms of just sentiment - will things get "worse" or "better"? This is why I always find it amusing when people say they're not having kids because they think the future will be awful because of climate change, or whatever the excuse.

For example, consider the world the Baby Boomers were born into. The world had just gone through two World Wars. People have invented amazing new ways to kill each other, including the atomic bomb. The world feels, and will feel for decades, balanced on the razor's edge of WWIII, where America and the Soviets will slug it out for global dominance one last time.

And then... nothing happened. Everyone got very wealthy from industrialization and international trade, there was no WWIII, nuclear weapons were never used in war again, the USSR just kind of disintegrated as a "Great Power", and the Baby Boomers are still widely regarded as the luckiest and wealthiest generation to have ever lived. There were reasonable rationales for expecting bad things to happen, but they didn't, for myriad reasons, that probably don't sound entirely as compelling as vivid and imaginative descriptions of nuclear holocaust.

It would have been a shame if everyone had held off having children because they knew WWIII was around the corner, and didn't think it was moral to have kids that would just die in a nuclear holocaust, and therefore did not create a demographic dividend for the West, that ultimately led to this massive prosperity.

I truly hope we discover ways to restore health fertility to women in their 60s and 70s, because I'm worried a lot of people are just going to regret the decisions of their 20s and 30s, when it turns out that the world is great in 30 or 40 years.

Well, how else are you supposed to go on living a mostly care free life without dread of the Earth's impending doom? It's kinda like believing in heaven, but has a chance of actually happening.

I think it's important to avoid "Rapture thinking". For those unfamiliar, a certain subset of Christians believe the cataclysmic end of the world is imminent, but that they will be whisked away to heaven beforehand. Therefore they discount the future.

While I think technical advancement of the type we hope for is obviously far more likely than such a fantastical event, we should proceed as though it is an inevitability. We must accept that the climate cake we've mixed is baking, and we should plan for a worst case outcome wherein the effects of climate change are significant and no or not enough great technologies emerge to mitigate them. I believe there will be a way forward even so, but we will face significant challenges.

I wouldn't expect sentient AI to be much more intelligent than humans by 2050.

It'll be better at doing repetitive tasks and tasks with lots of variables but that doesn't mean it'll actually have all the qualities of human intelligence when it comes to imagination or intuition.

You're making a mistake to assume AI will be so much like human intelligence. the parts of AI that seem very human will mostly be parts that humans injected in there and the underlying intelligence may be much different because it's not evolved in same way as pretty much all other life on the planet. Likely not going to have feelings and empathy. Probably not going to have fear and it's probably not going to imagine very well, but It will be able to think with Brute Force that is kind of like a different form of imagination. An exceptionable problem solver and coupled with human imagination I think we will do well together but it's probably more of a symbiotic relationship.

Your post is very ridiculous but what you're really seeing is that humans evolved dominated by negative stimulus because all life evolved like that because memorizing what can kill you requires less brain power than memorizing what makes you live.

Means all life tends to prioritize negative stimulus and you can also see that in the form of humans generally reacting to fear more than positive news so when you take something like speculation into account you wind up in a scenario where negative speculation or fear-based speculation it is always vastly more effective than any type of positive based speculation. you also see this in all the money markets where people panic very quickly and can have major sell-offs that turn into Domino effects but that almost never happens to a positive speculation in future technology.

It's not Just a problem with technology but for anybody who's into future Tech they might see it as like bias against future Tech.

Important to remember with climate change that we don't really know how much worse it might get as systems start to fall apart and humans start to panic because again we're right back to how fear motivates people more.

Also means if a trend devolves for the standard of living is declining because of droughts and flooding have a serious social collapse kind of like Rome collapsing Into the Dark Ages.

Climate change is dangerous but in all these scenarios even like nuclear war the most dangerous part is how humans react afterward and in the relative chaos created by rapid change.

For all we know whole singularity could very well accelerate climate change.

Really good podcast on this subject that's right up your alley just came out 2 days ago.

https://youtu.be/5Gk9gIpGvSE

Lomborg was also just on the JRE to discuss the same thing.

He points out simple things like "Fracking is obviously not ideal, but it's less damaging than coal and is the fastest way to get people off of coal." Paraphrasing exactly what he said, but it is a stepping stone to lower emissions despite the net damage it may do, it is less than the net damage of coal plants.

I'm more of the mind of someone like Randal Carlson. Sure we may have an effect on the environment but an asteroid is far more likely to destroy the earth's environment.

The over-all assertion is that it is far better to invest in tech breakthroughs related to emissions and energy generation than it is to do a lot of the measures prescribed by the authorities that be on this subject. "We're wasting trillions of dollars for solutions that may only net a small benefit."

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I feel you on this one. I think that if AI continues at it’s current pace, climate change will sorta become like the Black Death sometime in the 2030s. That is, a big problem that is easily solvable with modern tech.

Some people just wanna believe Armageddon is coming. They may cite data, but at the end of the day, they actually just don’t want to let it go. I think it is a waste of time to try to reach these people. I just let them have it.

But then there’s others who just have bad data or no data on how tech is progressing. For them, citing cost declines and exponential trends and why they are happening can be very useful

For example, I’m not just blindly optimistic on AI progress through the next decade. Instead, I’m noticing that while the traditional Moore’s Law around transistor density seems to be slowing, ASICs and algorithmic improvement are more than making up for it. In terms of how much intelligence you can build for some set amount of money, the exponential actually seems to be SPEEDING UP. And now that large, somewhat general models have commercial viability, there are MASSIVE financial incentives to continue progress.

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The problem is the polluting has already happened, and to reverse it will be almost impossible. We already had the chance to do what you’re talking about and chose not to, and continue to do the same.

There are no guarantees existing r&d efforts will result in a technological savior within your time horizon. There is no master plan, society is comprised of a bunch of individual money-making efforts. if the medicine that cures whatever ails you isn't profitable, you are not going to survive. Nothing can exist unless it has a high profit potential vs risk, there are always easier ways to make money.

>we lived through the ice age

Humans, not necessarily you individually, can survive the worst end of the AGW prediction range over the next 75 years. Just don't be poor. Would you prefer to spend your time trying to survive in such an environment or in the temperate interglacial that coincided with the rise of technological human civilization.

>what you just think by 2050 we'll be sitting on our asses doing nothing to prevent a mass extinction?

Why not, doing nothing is easy. Was anything done to prevent mass extinctions over the preceding 30 years.

Hope is a good thing. That said, I would imagine people's reaction to you talking about the singularity is that you're giving people an excuse to not do anything to improve things NOW, because there will be this deus ex machina event in our future that we can rely on that will fix everything.

There is also the thought that things will get worse so quickly as to logistically prevent technology from moving fast enough to affect things like the environment positively in our lifetime.

In some ways, yes. Singularianism is just religion for atheist nerds (like myself). Its a desire for a deus ex machina to intervene and help us rise above the boredom, misery, suffering and helplessness that define the human (and biology in general) condition.

We really don't know what a timeline for ASI is, or what ASI will be capable of. When Kurzweil wrote the singularity is near, he predicted we'd have a nanotech revolution in the 2020s and a biotech revolution in the 2010s. Neither happened. I think on a long enough timeline, ASI is inevitable. But I don't know what that timeline is.

There is also the fact that we live in a global oligarchy, and there is a very real chance that AGI or ASI will be used to help the oligarchs maintain their wealth and power rather than make life better for the masses. China is implementing massive surveillance based on AI. We are all addicted to our smartphones. The rich and powerful decide the fate of humanity for the most part. It sucks but its true.

If someone raises a valid concern with consequences both immediate and potential, like the fact that we are on a path to climate obliteration, and your response is that maybe AI will fix it one day when the singularity happens, then I think you are the definition of ignorant.

At this point, climate change is a social/political issue, not really a technical problem in need of a super-genius new solution. If we ask the post-singularity AGI for help, its reply will start with “Jesus Christ, you dumb, fucking monkeys…”

spending too much time worrying about the future or the past is robbing yourself of your presence of mind

these terms 'the singularity' are just hyperbole , we are in the moment right now , this is it , and tomorrow will be it as well , and the next day/week/month/year/etc ; obvs the dawn of AGI will be a big thing as well , but it will likely have already happened previously unknown/unrealized before or by the time its widely recognized

i dont think its bad/wrong to be optimistic about the future , and what's the alternative? to be miserable? i do think that we should be realists/realistic with our views ; so many of us are already living in a very real and very boring dystopia , that beast needs no further fuel/food

most normies are not going to be down with techno-predictions becuz the avg person knows little-to-nothing about the space ; even the experts in their fields say that any predictions further than a decade or two at this point are just silly , so many things are so disruptive and dynamic that its basically impossible to make accurate predictions [not that it was ever easy]

its hard to find ppl to have these kind of convos with , yep

but imho its more important to have convos about alan watts and stoicism for the majority of ppl , they can at least get something meaningful/useful that can make their lives immediately better , whereas dreaming about the amazing technological progress of tomorrow is wild/fun for us sci-fi/nerd types , but not everyone shares our minds eyes

Can both not be true at the same time? yes, we will reach AGI and then the Singularity and yes the climate and ecological crises will tip over to being irreversibly bad (unless we change course)

You hit a nerve... this is the biggest question of our time.

I worry that it will be the case of "the future is already here, just not evenly distributed"...
Look at what happened with the Covid19 vaccine. We essentially had the formula in 2 days and it still took a year and a half to complete testing, get it through the regulators and distribute (to the richer part of the world). Death can be a very binary thing for those six million people who died meanwhile.

That’s like continuing to smoke cigarettes because cancer treatment is going to be great in 2050

You're assuming the singularity will be accessible to the useless eaters.

I'd argue it's already being suppressed.

You did just fine. I agree with everything you said.

Its great that you are staying positive! But it’s a bit like jumping off of a very high cliff and hoping you’ll have enough time to assemble are your clothing in to a parachute during the time off the fall. Sure, you might be able to, you might not be. But wouldn’t it be better to try and not jump off of the cliff while you still have the chance?

Whether it’s global warming or the impending threat of AGI. What’s scary is the Inbetween! Millennials and Z, and some extent X, will be a generation of In-betweeners. By this I mean, less employment, growing population and a society ill prepared for the social issues advancement will make. It will take many many years for a solid livable assured income. And in that time “between” there will unfortunately be a lot of pain and suffering that will in turn require a time of recovery. In the end, we continue on, reach for the stars (I mean space!! Fuck your dreams) and as humans pull off one of our greatest feats!! We forget, time is just a construct.

It is really hard to speak to people about the problems facing humanity and the world without turning it into a "how will the singularity fix this problem" conversation, but often times when the discussion at hand is one about those classically unsolvable problems like wage inequality where it's so unsolvable it's basically a fact of daily life, but if the conversation turns to solving it it's just impossible for me to imagine the solution being anything else

Blxoom I think what you have explained concerning the inevitable mass extinction event that science claims is already underway and gaining momentum. Is while perhaps in some ways accurate and perhaps even probable, you are most likely correct concerning the more likely probability that we will soon reach our technological singularity and at that point our abilities and our possibilities will become virtually infinite and with the potential assistance of a friendly fully conscious and autonomous android/synthetic humanoids with a very similar neural system i.e. brain. With all the combined knowledge of the human race and the ability to analyze any problem in a matter of minutes and to create cost effective solutions that where in previous eras not even possible to fathom or contemplate solutions of such a nature. If mankind is wise and will choose to stop our endless cycles of unnecessary war and destruction, that have resulted in tens of millions of lives lost and have continuously and repeatedly driven the collective of man's consciousness into abject and total misery.

I think you're overestimating how much people take climate change in account when discussing the future. Not many people think long term about such issues and their higher-order effects. At best, they're parroting what the media says about resource wars and other issues (in the case of climate change) or "a future without jobs" (in the case of AI). It just isn't a prominent subject; this implies nothing about its relevance (or lack thereof). If you follow the subject and discuss things about it, you tend to think about things the average person ignores. Those who have the singularity in mind aren't special in that regard, as people who study or are interested in other fields (immunology, genetics, energy, etc.) tend to feel just the same about people ignoring the importance of present and future changes.

Both climate dooming and singularitarianism are incel religions for men that struggle to thrive in the current world.

"The singularity will give me purpose and a robot girlfriend" is the other side of the coin from dudes hoping society collapses 'cause they're losers with no prospects that think they could be warlords in a Mad Max world. There's also the suicidal, misanthropic soyboys that want everyone to die too...

Pure escapism, all of it.

I agree that if there were to be a tech that could save us, it would be the singularity, or something very close.

The problem is is that our remaining time is short, MUCH shorter than what’s spoken about in the media. Even if we were to get a superintellgience by, say, 2030, we might already be warmed to the point where a significant proportion of microbial life may not be able to survive, even if we go full speed at implementing any climate saving tech it were to produce. At least, not in time for the vast majority of us to survive. No microbes = no plants = no food = no air.

Also, the road to the singularity could be much longer than what we need to be able to save ourselves.

At the end of the day, what we call “AI” isn’t “intelligent” at all. They’re very accurate probability engines that operate at very low power compared to biological brains, not to mention anything of the fact that brains exhibit quantum qualities, bringing into question whether classical processors could EVER deliver the performance needed to come close, even if you were to weave together trillions of 0/1 transistors, as the current approach takes.

I read a RIKEN study about a month ago that tried to create a timeline for various full brain emulations that put the date for the primate (gorilla, IIRC) emulation after 2040 based on the current rate of semicon fabrication tech advancements.

I like your positive attitude, I agree that tech should always be considered, I too hope that we can save our planet. But I seriously wonder if we’re already out of time, with a few years of relative plenty left, to be followed by a rapid collapse.