I find this very naive. After the S, if such a thing is coming, we will have more options to choose in a more complex world, so it seems evident that we will have _more_ problems to solve, not less, but with he power to do something about them. I see the Singularity not like early retirement, but like the passage to adulthood.

It also implicitly states that qualitative superintellingence is impossible. Why should humans be the qualitatively smartest possible being? To assume we are is very un-Copernican. We should expect that many superintelligences will be ineffable and routinely think thoughts beyond our understanding.

Calling the Singularity an “early retirement” is misleading because it glosses over the unique risks (recursive self-improvement, superintelligence) of the event, as well as risks related to getting what we wish for in ways we don’t anticipate nor want, and the unique benefits (intelligence enhancement, pleasure engineering, creating completely new minds to communicate with). It fundamentally presents advanced AI as more of the same, when advanced AI will actually seem very magical, foreign, and unusual when it is created.

I do think, btw, that one of the effects of widespread AI will be to push the growth curve towards a one-year doubling time rate.

They say it doubles every year, and thus increases 1000-fold every decade.

It does not. The real rate is a doubling every 18 months, and thus 100-fold improvement every decade.

Thus, J Storrs Hall’s earlier sentence should mean that if AI costs $1 million in 2025, it would be $1000 in 2040, and $1 in 2055.

Don’t overstate the rate of progress. All these futurists, in 1999, thought that by 2009 all sorts of advances would have happened. Now that it is 2009, I don’t see any of them owning up to their overstatements.

A lot of this would also change. We’ll have other technologies also rising during these same time peroids. If VR can mimic reality to a degree that we can’t tell the differnce then let people engage in whatever form of ‘unhealthy’ sex they like so long as its virtual. Let them enter into gigantic versions of GTA and blast the hell out of each other. Frankly if they want to be wire heads and this we have technology that prevents us from being over burdened by their irresponsibility then let them bliss their lives away.

I’ve never fully understood the hatred (or, perhaps to be fair, outrage) people feel towards people on wellfare. Of course, to be fair, I’ve always been able to afford to live in neighborhoods, even in New York, where my interaction with people from the projects has been extremely limited. What confuses me is the generalization- the idea that anyone on any of these programs is and always has been a free rider. I support the existences of safety nets, imperfect as they are, because I believe that to not have them would be worse. That the externalities associated with their removal would impact me either more greatly or more unpleasantly than my higher taxes.

However, if I was someone barely getting by, working my ass off and hovering on the knife’s edge, I suppose my feelings towards someone doing far less but getting damn near the same comfort would be rather sour…

I always used “Nano-age” to refer to this time period, and variations like “Nano-society” to describe the people who would live there, from the original definition of nanotechnology.

“I think that most people would be devastated, misery and suicide would skyrocket, and senseless crime would not be far behind, if we did not have productive labor.”

Yes, without the ability to sit in a cubicle all day answering angry phone calls I would just be absolutely devastated… :rolleyes: From real-life VR games, to sports, to watching movies and listening to music and having parties and enjoying human replica fembots, I don’t think I or anyone else is going to be anything like devastated. Nice emotional word use, though.