opinions-singularity

some thoughts on posthumanism and space travel respectively:

i think it might happen, but probably not in our lifetimes. Sure, if everything goes as planned, development might continue to accelerate ever more rapidly. But geopolitical instability, ecological instability, etc. could still delay (or even destroy) everything, and I think the odds are that there will be at least one major delay.

One example that I ground my thinking about this in is robots. We still don't have household robots; we thought we'd have them decades ago. I think we'll get them, and probably in our lifetimes. So in that case, the glorious future looks like it'll still come to pass, but will be incredibly delayed (incredible relative to what we thought it would be; taking a century to develop household robots is pretty fast in the grand scheme of things).

As for singularity type stuff, I like it's possible but unlikely in our lifetimes;

Neuroscience still doesn't know that basics of how the brain computes; we still don't have an actual "debugger trace" of any of the fundamental processes like storing a memory (although we do have it for the first stages of visual and auditory processing).

Likewise, while A.I. has made great progress, it is hard to gauge how far we have left to go. But there are some tasks that indicate to me that we have a long ways to go. We can't beat all humans at chess without resorting to unfair amounts of lookahead. We don't have decent dictation software. We don't have household robots.