Is The Rapture Here? No, Wait: "We Are Now In The Singularity!"

This is via Real Clear Politics, so you know it's the best that's been thought and written:

OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman said during an interview on the "Relentless" podcast that "the singularity" has arrived and artificial intelligence is on the cusp of the point where they have created "a genie that can grant any wish." And the first thing he plans to do is wish for more wishes.

I guess Sam Altman is a big-picture guy, and big-picture guys can get away with being imprecise.

But the main thing that’s different from 10 years ago is, we’re actually in it. This is real. I think it is both true that it is all one crazy exponential, and any one moment is not the tipping point, and also that we are somehow in another one of those decisive periods where the curve can go one way or another, like it was when we started 10 years ago.

But what is this "it" we're actually "in"? All he does is say the same baloney we used to say in the dorm rooms 60 years ago: "Wow, man! Blows my mind!" Let's back up. According to Wikipedia,

The technological singularity, often simply called the singularity, is a hypothetical event in which technological growth accelerates beyond human control, producing unpredictable changes in human civilization. According to the most popular version of the singularity hypothesis, I. J. Good's intelligence explosion model of 1965, an upgradable intelligent agent could eventually enter a positive feedback loop of successive self-improvement cycles; more intelligent generations would appear more and more rapidly, causing an explosive increase in intelligence that culminates in a powerful superintelligence, far surpassing human intelligence.

What puzzles me is that Real Clear Politics often pairs essays with opposing views. Robert Reich will argue that Trump is Hitler, while Roger Kimball will explain that Trump isn't Hitler, and nobody will have learned a thing. Why didn't RCP post an opposing viewpoint here? My guess is that would have been too challenging a task for the interns who actually put the site together, but here's one they could have chosen, Sam Altman says AI has entered ‘singularity’: Should we be worried?

The 2014 US film Transcendence follows a dying scientist who uploads his mind to a supercomputer and becomes a near‑omnipotent intelligence. A year later, Ex Machina told the story of a humanoid robot who outsmarts her human handlers and escapes into the wider world.

Both of these films, like many others from the realm of science fiction, referred to what is known as “the singularity”, a moment in time when technology, particularly AI, surpasses human intelligence and becomes increasingly difficult to control.

However, the piece wanders off into whether everyone's gonna lose their jobs and doesn't raise the philosophical and scientific problems with the idea of AI and the "singularity". Noam Chomsky, with whom I disagree 99.4% of the time on linguistics as well as politics, nevertheless makes an important point:

He implies that the singularity is a misconception born of confusing impressive engineering with theoretical science; because machines lack the biological and cognitive architecture to understand “why” as opposed to “what,” they cannot surpass human intelligence in any meaningful sense. They simply hit a wall of diminishing returns where more data yields better mimicry but not understanding.

At the same link,

Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Chief AI Scientist at Meta, offers a skeptical perspective grounded not in linguistics, but in the practical engineering and physics of intelligence. While he acknowledges the utility of current AI, he vehemently disagrees with the notion that scaling up current Large Language Models will result in Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or a singularity event. LeCun argues that the current paradigm of autoregressive token prediction—guessing the next word—is inherently flawed and incapable of capturing the complexities of the physical world.

. . . LeCun’s argument is that true intelligence requires a “world model”—an internal simulation of reality that allows an entity to predict outcomes and plan actions based on understanding physics and causality, not just text patterns. He suggests that until AI architectures move beyond text prediction to model-based reasoning (similar to how humans and animals learn), they will remain tools rather than super-intelligent beings.

Further,

Rodney Brooks, a roboticist and former director of the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, challenges the singularity through a lens of robotic interaction and linear progress. Brooks is famous for critiquing the “exponentialist” fallacy, the belief that because computing power grows exponentially, AI capability will follow suit indefinitely. He argues that progress in AI is often subject to logistical curves that flatten out, and that the jump from current AI to AGI is not a smooth trajectory but a series of incredibly hard engineering problems that do not solve themselves.

. . . He argues that the singularity narrative ignores the difficulty of interfacing AI with the messy, unstructured real world, a problem known as Moravec’s paradox.

According to Wikipedia,

Moravec's paradox is the observation that, as Hans Moravec wrote in 1988, "it is comparatively easy to make computers exhibit adult level performance on intelligence tests or playing checkers, and difficult or impossible to give them the skills of a one-year-old when it comes to perception and mobility". This counterintuitive pattern may happen because skills that appear effortless to humans, such as recognizing faces or walking, required millions of years of evolution to develop, while abstract reasoning abilities like mathematics are evolutionarily recent.

But it's just as easy to substitute for "evolution" the idea that consciousness and active volition are something God put to some extent in all creatures, they didn't necesssrily evolve that way.

The basic problem is that people who believe in the "singularity" read too much science fiction. Maybe I'll get into that another time.