Daydream believer

A Wired article about last weekend's Singularity Summit asks "are you a believer?". It would indeed be lamentable if proponents of AI were simply to become Kurzweil worshiping cultists, and in an effort to gain greater notoriety it has always been a risk that scientifically informed opinions could become steadily more diluted until nothing more than nonsense or wishful thinking remains.

And many attendees voiced the belief that the singularity would change humankind and that those who survive until the event happens will reap great rewards -- painting a Utopian vision of the world.

Utopia? Yeah, er, well...good luck with that. Utopianism implies a narrow view of the world, and one which can easily lead to unpleasant consequences for anyone who doesn't share the same illustrious vision. In the early 20th century the communists wanted a workers paradise, and the fascists wanted a utopia of racial extermination and unending savagery. True believers, when mobilized in sufficient numbers, can be a dangerous irrational mob.

“I worry about the rhetoric because science is under attack more than ever before and the rhetoric of the singularity seems more appropriate for a religious movement than science,” said science journalist John Horgan

And on that point I'm inclined to agree with him. Rhetoric is not a substitute for reason and is often its antithesis. If the path to a technological singularity really is as fraught with difficulties as people like Eliezer Yudkowsky have suggested it's going to require careful consideration and critical thinking at every step, not the mindless herd behavior of cult worshipers.

Although I am a believer in the sense that I think machines will become much smarter than they are now, the idea that this will necessarily mean that life will become some kind of perfect utopia seems like wooly thinking to me. Behind the scenes modern life is already supported by a lot of ingenious mechanization, and although things may be somewhat better today than they were for our distant ancestors we can see that it's certainly not entirely a bowl of cherries.