money is in short supply

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 10:15 PM, Sean Dzafovic wrote:
(...)
> To me, the Singularity seems like one of those "fusion is always 50
> years away" kind of things.
(...)

I had my time of Singularitarianism, but now I am also skeptic about
the coming wonders announced by that school of thought. Perhaps
because, according to some "hard take off" predictions, the
Singularity should have started a couple of years *ago* :), but most
likely because the inductive argument in favor of the Singularity is
the same behind many other predictions that ultimately failed:
"because this or that technology is progressing at an exponential rate
now, it will progress exponentially forever". Alas, unlimited
exponentials don't exist in nature (or human societies for that
matter); what we have are sigmoids that *look* exponential for a time.
(In the best case. In the worst, we have spectacular crashes at the
top of the "exponential", as we often see when an economic bubble
collapses.)

Lets remember that the same kind of argument was used in the 60s, but
applied to space travel, not artificial intelligence. "Look, in this
decade we put men on the Moon and produced commercial supersonic
flight, so it is obvious that in the year 2000 we will have
supraluminal starships able to flight at Warp 9.8!" :)