Frozen Floors

This is a reply to Scott Aaronson's post The Singularity Is Far. In it, he writes:

As you may have gathered, I don’t find the Singulatarian religion so silly as not to merit a response. Not only is the “Rapture of the Nerds” compatible with all known laws of physics; if humans survive long enough it might even come to pass. The one notion I have real trouble with is that the AI-beings of the future would be no more comprehensible to us than we are to dogs (or mice, or fish, or snails). After all, we might similarly expect that there should be models of computation as far beyond Turing machines as Turing machines are beyond finite automata. But in the latter case, we know the intuition is mistaken. There is a ceiling to computational expressive power. Get up to a certain threshold, and every machine can simulate every other one, albeit some slower and others faster. Now, it’s clear that a human who thought at ten thousand times our clock rate would be a pretty impressive fellow. But if that’s what we’re talking about, then we don’t mean a point beyond which history completely transcends us, but “merely” a point beyond which we could only understand history by playing it in extreme slow motion. (emphasis mine)

This is a video of someone beating the game Pokemon Yellow in slightly over two minutes. It is incomprehensible. If you play it in extreme slow motion, it is still incomprehensible, because it is not the speed of the button-mashing that takes a game usually beaten in hours or days and does it in minutes. It's the amount of thought that goes into each button mashed. The depth of the contemplation is such that even the author's comments, which explain what he did, will still be largely incomprehensible to most people.

It's true that if in 1954, 27 years of history suddenly took place in a day, a typical pipe-smoking, newspaper-reading man from 1954 could, if he replayed it in extreme slow motion, eventually understand the world of 1981. The problem is that tomorrow it will be 2008, and the day after tomorrow it will be 2035.

Now, it's true as Scott says that history won't completely transcend this man. It's absolutely hopeless for him to achieve even a basic grasp of what's going on, but despite the 10,000fold speed difference he can still have a place in the world, likely as a coat rack or something.

The point I'm trying to make is that a simple overclocking of the speed of thought is more than enough to write humanity's final chapter.



Also see: Orbital - The Box