Alex Barnett blog : Singularity

I Am a Strange Loop

alexbarnett — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 01:45:00 GMT

About 10 years ago a friend gave to me a book as gift. We were sitting on the deck of a canal boat on a Friday late afternoon set for a weekend of lazy meandering with friends and family along the Thames, when he handed me his own copy of Godel, Escher, Bach. "You'll love this" he said.

Willem was was right. Godel, Escher, Bach not only tickled my penchant for self-referentialism and recursion ("It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account"), it also reinforced an odd conviction I've held that "magic" happens where these oddities exist (all around and within us).

Last week, (thanks to Nick Carr), I was alerted to Douglas R. Hofstadter's latest mind-bender, I Am a Strange Loop. The book arrived today, unpacked and on the table when I got back from work this evening...inviting me to another voyage with this great mind:

"Deep down, your brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles. On a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol is the one you call "I". An "I" is a strange loop where the brain's symbolic and physical levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down so that symbols seem to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics? These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach. Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for."

Engineering Challenges...

alexbarnett — Sun, 17 Feb 2008 15:29:00 GMT

Doh!

In the meantime...Some unsually sensible discussion is taking place at a Slashdot thread re: Kurzweil's prediction (and one of the original Long Bets): Artificial Intelligence at Human Level by 2029?

Mind Camp 3.0 - Singularity Session Video

alexbarnett — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 16:03:00 GMT

I love Mind Camp. When I'm asked what Mind Camp is I answer that it is what ever you want to make it. (more on the unconference format here). When I arrived on Saturday morning I browsed the sessions that other attendees had proposed and there a number that I wanted to attend.

(pic by ario)

I popped out to get a coffee from Starbucks and on the way I asked myself the question: what session isn't there that I would turn up to if it was proposed? My answer was a session on Ray Kurzweil's book 'The Singularity is Near'.

So I got a hold of session submission form when I got back from Starbucks, filled it out and the next thing I knew I was in a room moderating a discussion with 20 smart people disucssing the idea of the Singularity for an hour.

Lazy me: no preparation (could you tell? ;-), no slides, no objective of the session other than to discuss with others something that interests them and me. Most people in the room had either already read the book or were some way through it, so I started by asking the group which questions we should have a go at discussing and writing these up on the chalkboard (what are the risks? what about individual identity? what would 'its' motivation be if a collective intelligence emerged? would 'it' care about us? would we retain 'free will'? etc). And we went from there.

Thanks to Bryan Zug Vids who recorded a video of the session and has posted on to blip.tv. The video starts about five minutes into the session.

Computers on the scale of solar systems

alexbarnett — Mon, 09 Oct 2006 02:31:00 GMT

Am reading a book by Ray Kurzweil, one I've been meaning to get around to for some time and thoroughly enjoying so far, The Singularity is Near. I was just blown away by the following paragraph (p136 of 2006 paperback edition). So much so, I have to share this with you:

"And, of course, human civilization will not be limited to computing with a few pounds of matter. In chapter 6, we'll examine the computational potential of an Earth-like planet and computers on the scale of solar systems, of galaxies, and of the entire known universe. As we will see, the amount of time required for our human civilization to achieve scales of computation - and intelligence - that go beyond our planet and into the universe may be a lot shorter than you might think."

I love the sheer...immensity of Kurzweil's vision.