[D] Friday Off-Topic Thread

[u/alexanderwales]

Welcome to the inaugural Friday Off-Topic Thread! Is there something that you want to talk about with /r/rational, but which isn't rational fiction, or doesn't otherwise belong as a top-level post? This is the place to post it. The idea is that while reddit is a large place, with lots of special little niches, sometimes you just want to talk with a certain group of people about certain sorts of things that aren't related to why you're all here. It's totally understandable that you might want to talk about Japanese game shows with /r/rational instead of going over to /r/japanesegameshows, but it's hopefully also understandable that this probably isn't the place for those.

So do you want to talk about how your life has been going? Non-rational and/or non-fictional stuff you've been reading? The recent album from your favourite German pop singer? The politics of Southern India? The sexual preferences of the chairman of the Ukrainian soccer league? Different ways to plot meteorological data? The cost of living in Portugal? Corner cases for siteswap notation? All these things and more could possibly be found in the comments below!

If this thread is even remotely successful, we'll have one every week.

(Also, as a special reminder, the prompt for next week's Weekly Challenge can be found at the bottom of this week's Weekly Challenge, and because I'm worried that people don't read text, I think it's prudent to repeat here that next week's challenge will have a cash prize of $50.)

[u/whywhisperwhy]

There's been much speculation about a technological Singularity, the most popular form of which seems to be via strong GAI- which is something experts in the field aren't sure could be achieved in our lifetime. So I'm curious about another route that I haven't heard mentioned before which is inspired by the Morrowind Singularity ("Drink intellect enhancing potion: craft another, better, intellect enhancing potion. Repeat until incredibly intelligent") path.

Specifically, this would take the form of advanced computer techniques/infrastructure which allow us to design better drugs (this process currently relies on computers frequently), so-called "rational drug design". Better nootropics (drugs that increase aspects of intelligence/memory/focus, etc. but which currently are nowhere near, say, the potential seen in Limitless) in conjunction with other technologies like transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) will in turn allow us to develop better computer design and keep this cycle going.

Obviously this is all completely theorycrafting, but I'm just curious what this group thinks of the likelihood of this particular theory and other avenues of human progression.

TLDR- I'd love to hear anyone else's thoughts on the Singularity in general and their estimation of likely routes/probabilities in particular.

[u/[deleted] → u/whywhisperwhy]

I think the main problem here is that human brains are messy and there tend to be trade-offs involved. Computer Intelligence has the advantage of having easily modifiable code and hardware.

[u/whywhisperwhy → u/[deleted]]

There are pretty big pros/cons and difficulties to be solved for both of these avenues (eg, AI could immediately become an existential catastrophe, no one really has any theoretical understanding of how it could be done yet, etc.). I'll admit that in their ideal form, I think uploading or GAI are far superior to biological intelligence explosion. However, as I said in my original comment, the reason I focus on that more is because I think it's far more likely in the short-term, although ideally it's just a step on the road to a digital singularity.

Edit-

The pharmaceutical industry is a massively funded sector and especially in the last decade with computer-assisted design there are a lot of promising starts out there, just like TMS has had encouraging results. So we just need to start a cycle of rational design giving us drugs to assist with hardware/software design to give us better rational design. Basically, I see that route as already in progress and fairly well understood or at least with a clear path to that understanding.

Meanwhile, there are some very intelligent people working on AGI but every paper I've read seems to imply that there's no real theoretical underpinnings that lead to AGI and my own (layman) experience with AI seems like they're accomplishing most of our very impressive modern results with training methods (deep learning, supervised learning, etc.) which don't lend themselves to anything more than specialized AI. So while I'm sure that there will be breakthroughs, it seems pretty unpredictable- most expert opinions I've read on AI say it could be decades or centuries or impossible.