Singularity

The looming technological singularity has given me some pretty awful existential anxiety. How do I get over the fact that we're all ultimately worthless retards in the grand scheme of the universe?

How can I live happily knowing that I'm going to be replaced by vastly superior beings very soon?

>How do I get over the fact that we're all ultimately worthless retards in the grand scheme of the universe?

That's true even if we never create AI, user.

It won't happen within our lifetime, so we can enjoy speculating about the morals and ethics of a general AI that can improve upon itself, quickly achieving intelligence greater of that of its creators, without having to worry about the consequences on us.

Feels good man.

If that happens, your species will have become the mythologically archetypal Lost People, grand and vast societies of technological knowledge never before seen. When the end comes and the rusting frames of our great glass temples to prosperity are knitted over with lichen, we will be studied and marveled at, as something unique--foolish, closed-minded, but with limitless potential brought to a close before our time.

Alternatively, you can realize that all consciousness is one thing--that we are consciousnesses, much more than the arbitrarily designated moniker for our biological sheaths, "human beings." As such, all consciousnesses currently extant are our siblings, no matter how estranged. All consciousnesses yet to be are our children, or at least our inheritors. It is good to wish them well.

Alternatively, you can realize that the world will likely peter out before it comes to that, and the tectonic pattern of the crust will guarantee another supercontinent, and with it, weather inhospitable to all forms of life, ensuring that biology will not be able to create anything like us through the only means it has at its disposal: evolution.

Alternatively, stop being such a bitch and worrying about non-issues.

That chart is so STEM

I cant imagine how an AI can exist.
As in what sort of shape or form it will have to allow it to have the sort of consiousness we do. Its easy to just imagine a computer talking to you and being self aware but its obvious that a computer as we know it today cannot and will not be able to do this. A machine that would produce consiousness will have to be something radically different as our consiousness is a reuslt of exactly our entire embodied experience. We are not jsut our brain. We are the process of growing and chaging and developing a central nervous system as part of an entire creature with a body.
Trying to create an AI that thinks like us would mean that his goal will quickly be to find his place in the word as a sentient being. We are drivne by our bodily desires and craving which end with a general curiosity about the world.
How will a lab "AI" be curious? What will drive it? He will be born out of some lab experiment obviously and if he is to be as self critical as we are so that he will be able to improve himself in EVERY way, he will have to fight the constraints we put on it.
That will be supposedly be his driving force, his birth and process of growing much like how we try to find our way in the world and fight to find our place within it.
An AI able to truly be critical of his existence will become alive into a system that treats it like a slave(if we htrink of the world as it is today). A structure that is not ready for it and this is an impossibility.
Much like life itself comes to existence into a system that is ready to include it so will a completely sentient AI only come to exist when our lives and society can naturally support such a being.
An AI will enter into our lives smoothly, gradually into an eco system that is completely ready to integrate it into itself.
So we have to ask what sort of a society will we be into which a fully sentient AI can be effortlessly integrated into.

...

I don't really understand why the singularity bothers people.

The worst case scenario is that machines eventually replace humans, but you were already destined to die and be replaced by another generation, just as every generation before you has. From the perspective of a dead man, what difference does it make whether the next generation is made of flesh or made of metal?

I think we are alos thinking about it in the wrong way.
In some sense our non sentient AIs are just like the tools of ancient humans, heling them deal with their problems.
In the same sense our structures we created, our methodologies are also such tools.
For example the scientific method.
We are emerssed in methodologies and porocess which we as individuals dont really have any control over, in some sense the control us.
We know that to do X in our socities we have to go through certain procceses and steps.
So our self created strucures are already governing as as individuals and they themsleves are self improving through our collective actions.
Now what is a sentient AI of which most people think? What is this sentient talking head?
It is essentially an individual that can grasp all of humanity, that knows everything humanity knows and aware of it.
We want society as a whole to be able to talk to us as an individual.
This is essneitally what this super sentient AI is.
I think that by the time we create such a thing we will first learn how to partially or fully be able to do this ourselves. As in we will be able to augment ourselves to be able to grasp all encodable knowledge. All of wikipedia, all of the latest events and research and thoughts.
This is in part hat the internet is as well we just cxant fully grasp it as individuals as all our knowledge and experiences are encoided and uploaded into it.
IN some sense whats probably is that we will become this AI, we will unify with our own creations step by step. they will become intergrated into each and every indivdual.
We each of us will hold a reflection of all human knowledge within ourselves.
You can call it a sentient AI but it wont be something seperate, it will be us but changed.

and in this sense we area leady fighting an AI, we are already fighting our own created structures and algorythms.
ISIS is fighting the westenr structures and algorithms of being, and many of us in westenr societies are also fighting different parts of our creatures structures in an attempt to modify them. What is this "invisible hand of the market"? its a very complex machanism that we are supposed to let run by itself through us.
These are emergent properties of human civilization that have a mind of their own and which we are already fighting as some of us feel they are opressing us.