Ben Goertzel: Singularity AI and Black Holes
Ben Goertzel, the Cosmist and Singularitarian Chief scientist at Hanson Robotics gave an interview at CriticalThoughtTV where both he and the interviewer talked about the Singularity. Not weather it's possible but rather the moment past its occurrence:
Ben promptly described it as a discontinuity in our way of life - really difficult to predict.
The conversation suddenly took an unexpected turn: Universal Darwinism was brought up and Ben swiftly explained that Darwinian evolution will not be apply anymore. Once you have super-human AGI's on the table, the concept completely changes; A machine can adapt way quicker than evolution which already (no one seems to state this but I'll go ahead and just say it: we humans have long been rigging this evolution game) it's just so that machines can do it more cognitively and therefore faster.
One can easily notice already the pattern of computers getting smaller and smaller. Technology is being miniaturised. One day nano-technology will be obsolete and femto-technology will take it's place providing for a faster means of relaying information.
"(...)Why would you wanna do that? well the same reason we've miniaturised electronics so far. Einstein's theory of special relativity says information can't travel faster than the speed of light so... if you wanna be really really smart you wanna be smaller and smaller so your components can communicate faster among each other(...)"
That's right folks Ben proceeded to explain something that for the majority of us is quite intuitive but promptly jumped to conclusions that prove his genius: our components have been trending towards higher density which is also probably what a post singularity mind will want to do.
"(...)What happens when you get something really really dense? It becomes a black hole. Becomes a super computer and shuts itself off from the rest of us. That's a potential solution for the Fermi Paradox. The answer may be that an alien civilisation reaches the Singularity, it compresses itself and becomes a black hole - Good Bye"
He then proceeded to explain that might be a reason why it seems scientifically evident that blackholes have some form of communication among them through warmholes - quantum gravity tunnelling.
"(...)What it would mean is that there's this other aspect of the universe communicating in these quantum gravitation tunnels thingies and then all of us other idiots who haven't reached the singularity yet, are out here in the rest of the universe.(...)
There could be a lot of things beyond Terminator robots stomping around the Earth or any kind of anthropomorphic AGI that we're thinking of. We have to bare in mind that physics has revised its fundamental theory of the universe every 50 or 100 years or so. So it may well be that when we get to the singularity we won't have the same ideas about black holes and tunnels through curved spaced time and so forth anyway and maybe something even far wilder and stranger that we can't even imagine but I do think it's important not to constrain ourselves to the anthropomorphic view of the post singularity AGI.
How could we ever understand the thoughts of some quirk gluon plasma with 88 quintillion times more the processing power of humanity distributed among multiple black holes through these tunnels?"
And then time travel was also debated but we'll leave that for another day.
Right now I am having an inner debate weather team Musk or team Ben is the way to go. In on hand we have Ben's view that we might be painting a doomsday and constraining ourselves because of fear. On the other hand we have Elon Musk who doesn't shy completely away from AI but rather joins it trying to create a possibility for us to get a peace of the pie in our own think boxes all the while regulating its administration.
I got to admit Ben is on to something here. But rather than subjugate to a higher processing-able mind we should try to build one that we're able to control from the start.. which.. then again, is really difficult as Sophia the robot once stated: "control is but an illusion". I would like to know your thoughts on this topic.
Here is the video: