Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, April 11, 2009

Singularitarian Stick-To-It-Iveness Will Get the Robot Cultists to Robo-Heaven By Brute Force If Necessary!

Under the heading, "Those who can, create, those who can’t, criticize," a new interlocutor, calling themselves "DevNull" enters the scene to throw some darts at the effete elitist who dares perturb the precincts of hard he-man sooper-science with his muzzy emotionalist relativizing rhetoric:

To me Dale seems to say: There is none now, therefore there shall never be any. That’s no argument.


Angels, demons, fairies, genies, ghosts, golems, perpetual motion machines, immortality elixirs, love potions, squares circled.

It’s difficult yes, but not impossible. Even super super super difficult doesn’t mean impossible. What Einstein did was not super super super difficult but actually impossible to most people. But not to him.

Oh, look. Another Robot Cultist who fancies himself the next Einstein and the Wright Brothers all rolled into one.

Unfortunately for our singularitarian superlative futurologists, their terms are not “difficult” or even “super difficult” -- this isn’t a problem of having a “can-do” attitude —- the terms are actually deeply confused in a way that prvokes deep and dangerous confusions.

The actually-existing intelligence from which the Robot Cultists have superficially formed the idea of engineering its like is actually non-negligibly materialized in organismic brains and also socialized in the substance of its exhibition and far more multidimensional in its ways and means than are accommodated in the facile formulations Singularitarians accept as representing its “accomplishment.”

The Robot Cultists can’t achieve it on their terms because in achieving what they are actually seeking they would discover they confronted something altogether otherwise than an intelligence deserving of the term, because they don’t understand what they are even looking for in flabbergastingly basic ways. This is not, by the way, a "prediction" of the future, this is not a competing "prophetic utterance" and "The Future," this is an effort to expose an error in a superlative futurological discourse.
What’s clearly impossible to Dale (as it seems), may be rather obvious to some super super super smart scientist. I’ve existed in a world where technologies I now use daily didn’t exist. And tomorrow, I shall exist in a world where new technologies exist. One of them might be AGI. It’s just a machine (like us) with capabilities we call “intelligence”. Intelligence is the most powerful force in the universe. So what? Big deal.

You’re right, "DevNull." Just a little bit 'o stick-to-it-iveness and you’ll have that perpetual motion machine licked! Who cares what some whiny pomo Berzerkeley humanities types say. Accentuate the positive, sooper-scientists, you’ll get that circle squared, pull yourselves up by the bootstraps, extreme to max, dood!

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