Thanks for the link to your essay, I mostly agree with it. I think the name “singularity” originally came from Vernor Vinge’s novel “Marooned in Realtime;” at least, there is where I first encountered it, and I don’t know of an older reference.

Ian: You seem to think that there can only be one singularity and that the issue is when it happens or happened. It seems to me that there have been several already. I’ve written my thoughts about this at the above URL.

Imagine, for instance, the computer-trading system as a whole achieving sentience, and then using details of transactions and valuations to manipulate the market and, thereby, human society. It might act to bring a monotonically increasing part of human activity under the control of futures markets. Now, omit the sentience, and have it result from subtleties in the construction of the trading apparatus. We might observe life becoming increasingly commoditized, and suspect it has a cause, but not be able to trace it to any details of the trading apparatus.

Everybody sensible knew there was a housing bubble, but most people in finance thought it would be a soft landing. I don’t think anybody foresaw the freezing of the short-term credit market. At least, I don’t recall reading that prediction anywhere. People thought the housing bubble would deflate the way the Internet stock bubble did.

Although actually, when I say that everybody knew there was a housing bubble, I tell a lie. Some finance companies construct models based on past behaviour, and in the past housing prices never declined across the U.S. They used that fact to model future performance, and thus to support their purchase of complex derivatives which were based on housing prices never going down. This only happened for complex derivatives, because in simple cases people said “say, that’s not true.” In complex ones they let it slide. Hence back to the original topic of this post.

The article you cite seems to have some errors. It is not necessarily the case that when market money vanishes, somebody profits. When a stock prices drops precipitously, nobody is selling all the way down. The price starts at one point, and the next point where anybody buys may be far lower. Though of course I agree that the housing bubble would show that Alan Greenspan really didn’t know what he was doing—if we hadn’t already learned that when he supported the Bush tax cuts back in 2001.

Ian: What is complexity except interactions? Seriously at issue is “system”: some sort of long-term, more or less stable, active arrangement. (“Solar system”, “visual system”, “financial system”) It’s one thing to be able to recognize the presence of a system when it’s pointed out, and another thing to notice it under the leaf litter, (especially when the leaf litter is the system).

Anyway, the collapse of the banking system wasn’t because it wasn’t foreseen. It was that an individual player could had to follow the rules of the game or be ejected. Any number could be ejected without averting the event. As Doug Rushkoff pointed out, they not only foresaw the collapse, they arranged to profit from it.

The ways to avoid these problems are indeed simple, but people didn’t understand that they had these problems. They didn’t fully understand what they were betting on. At least, that is what I think. When things started to turn sour on Wall Street last year, the mood was not “well, it was bound to catch up to us someday;” it was “what the heck is going on?”

I agree that conventional weapons will continue to be more dangerous than nuclear weapons, but nuclear weapons have a special stigma that is all their own. The firebombing of Dresden killed a lot more people than the bombing of Hiroshima.

If I were to pick the city most likely to be destroyed by a nuclear weapon, it would be Tel Aviv.

I certainly believe that AI is possible and that it will come to exist at some point, though I don’t know if it will be in this century. What I don’t believe in is the singularity. Or, rather, I believe that if there is such a thing as a singularity, that it happened 100 years ago.

I can understand how technology can give us access to a great deal more information, and I agree that that is a qualitative change. I don’t understand how that makes anybody smarter or more creative. Leonardo da Vinci had several unusual qualities, and I think is best described as an artist. Better technology doesn’t make me into an artist; knowledge is not the same as insight.

If you have a business environment where you can run a company into the ground, get paid a lot of money to do so, and then have the government take over the bad debts then the smart (although not nice) thing to do is to run a company into the ground.

With the way the Bush regime has been running the US with the complicity of the Democratic party (who have not even tried to impeach him) it seems reasonable to expect that the $700,000,000,000 bailout plan or something similar would happen.

Knowing how to avoid these problems is actually quite simple, it was all figured out after the great-depression and there were a set of laws enacted to prevent such problems. Anyone who ran a bank could have said “the other banks are doing wild stuff and making some extra profits doing risky things that used to be illegal, but let’s be cautious and avoid all that”.

Regarding nuclear war, the risk of an all-out war between countries such as the US and the former USSR seems low. But the risk of small attacks seems reasonably high (given that insane people like the leader of North Korea have nukes). It would surprise me if Washington lasts another 100 years without being nuked, but I expect that the vast majority of deaths from wars over the next 100 years will be from “conventional” weapons.

As for the singularity etc, it seems that betting against improvements in technology is almost always going to be a losing bet. It seems to me that the issue of AI is whether you believe that there is something magical about a brain or whether you believe that any self-modifying system of comparable complexity can have emergent intelligence. Even withought AI, the possibilities for enhancing human abilities (including mental abilities) seem significant. A country that had a significant minority of the population with abilities comparable to Leonardo da Vinci would have a massive advantage over countries with conventional populations. Michael seems to be considering all the possibilities.