{"id":137646,"date":"2022-04-03T02:02:32","date_gmt":"2022-04-03T07:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/the-singularity-is-very-close"},"modified":"2022-04-03T02:02:32","modified_gmt":"2022-04-03T07:02:32","slug":"the-singularity-is-very-close","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2022\/04\/the-singularity-is-very-close","title":{"rendered":"The singularity is very close"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/the-singularity-is-very-close2.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I subtitled this post \u201cWhy we\u2019re all in denial about the robot apocalypse\u201d. I say that because I believe that society at large is completely, utterly, and <em>woefully<\/em> unprepared for the advent of sentient, <em>living<\/em> artificial general intelligence. I think the singularity is coming much sooner than most people expect, and I think it\u2019s going to cause a great deal of upset when it arrives \u2014 for better <em>and<\/em> for worse.<\/p>\n<p>Take for instance the common religious belief that people possess some unmeasurable, undefinable <em>soul<\/em>, and that this soul is what separates us from inanimate objects and non-sentient animals. Furthermore, some people believe that these souls come from deity. I have spoken with friends who believe that AGI is impossible because \u201crobots can\u2019t have souls, humans aren\u2019t God\u201d. For these people, like Caleb says in <em>Ex Machina <\/em>(paraphrasing)<em>,<\/em> removing the line between man and machine also <strong>removes the line between god and man.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Now, this isn\u2019t to say that AGI will destroy religion or anything \u2014 it may even be used to strengthen some sects (as taken to the extreme in HBO\u2019s Raised By Wolves). No, religion has been around for millennia and I\u2019m sure it will continue to be around for many more millennia. I\u2019m simply predicting that a subset of religious people are going to experience <strong>lots of cognitive dissonance<\/strong> when the first AGI arrives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I subtitled this post \u201cWhy we\u2019re all in denial about the robot apocalypse\u201d. I say that because I believe that society at large is completely, utterly, and woefully unprepared for the advent of sentient, living artificial general intelligence. I think the singularity is coming much sooner than most people expect, and I think it\u2019s going [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":359,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-137646","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-robotics-ai","category-singularity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137646","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/359"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=137646"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/137646\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=137646"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=137646"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=137646"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}