You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
]]>As for me I have 3 of them in place no problem, I guess that makes me a lean long jawed pleistocene throwback :)
]]>I'm happy that Collins' definition #4 (Vis comment #94) extends to a new "#5 - a game-changing event that there is no going back after": Given the continued existence of such things as steak tartare and sashimi I'm less convinced that either agrarianism or fire (and hence cookery) are such events.
]]>I note the #5 definition, which is my interpretation, effectively. If our guts have changed ( & they have) then we can't go back, can we? You can't re-run evolution (I think). Oh, & paws, we CAN eat Steak Tartare, but we are much better adapted to eating cooked food, & we get far more nutrition from it than uncooked (usually). There has been a real, permanent change. See also THIS excellent treatise on the subject for some real information.
BESIDES, if you are so keen on definitions, there are plenty to choose from. Try Here and Here and Here, too !!
Pick one, and stop picking on me, huh?
]]>Explain yourself in detail, or retract.
I will note that the first stage arrangement of 30 NK-15 LOX/Kerosene burning motors is not that dissimilar to the first stage arrangement of SpaceX's Falcon Heavy (with 27 LOX/Kerosene burners firing at lift-off), which is due on a pad at Cape Canaveral next year. Yes, they had control problems, but they mostly licked them by the final (fourth) launch -- that left them with pogoing, a problem that also affected the Saturn V, and was fixable. If they made any key mistake it was probably in going for a revolutionary, not evolutionary, design: the N1 was all-new, whereas Saturn V leveraged Saturn IB and Saturn I (based on Redstone tech), taking a more incremental approach.
]]>That's a singularity - that point where there is no value, where infinities suddenly pop out of the woodwork. You can't even say whether the value at zero is positive or negative.
That same unexpected appearance of infinities is what causes the black hole meaning of singularity: the density, and therefore the gravitational field strength and so on, appear to have infinite values at the actual centre point.
Similarly with the 'Technological Singularity', which is not that there is change (there's almost always change, to one extent or another) but that the rate of technological change has been accelerating ever harder, to the extent that it seemingly goes infinite and what happens on the far side is invisible. This is what Von Neumann was thinking of, back in the late '50s.
My personal opinion is to agree with Charlie that it is not going to happen, that people are being fooled by S curves. To get an effective infinity in the real world, you need to build on some form of infinity to start with, and those aren't there. For Von Neumann in 1958 the ever rising world flight airspeed record might have appeared to be a prime example. Not only had it doubled in the previous decade (671 mph to 1404 mph), but that doubling had taken place in less time than the previous doubling (1929 to 1948). That looks pretty like a curve taking off to infinity.
And yet, not only did it not even double again in the following decade, it has not doubled yet, being only about 50% higher than in '58. Going faster requires ever more power, and there's no way to get the infinite power required for infinite speed.
]]>I'd go with the idea that we've had at least four no-fooling technological singularities already:
Many others could be added, but ISTM that we're on the front edge of a rolling set of singularities that began more than 500 years ago.
]]>Given that, very few of your examples cut the muster. Printing press, steam engine, and aircraft were fairly understandable to anyone; telegraph would also be, although radio might qualify. (The printing press and steam engine are, conceptually, nothing more than labour-saving: you can achieve the same result Gutenberg got simply by having enough monks copying.)
The one singularity I know we, as a species, had is the invention of language. This is a bit of a cheat, perhaps: one of the things language gets you is the ability to convey abstract notions, so how can you convey abstract notions to someone who doesn't have the ability to comprehend someone else's abstract notions? But, then, that's the kind of change Vinge was talking about, and I always use him as the reference for discussions of Singularities :).
Writing itself probably doesn't qualify, because it's an improved form of oral history. Money might count, however.
]]>AFAIK, guts and brains are the two most energy-hungry systems in the body. If you're stuck with a limited calorie budget, you've got to allocate to one or the other. Humans have cheated by predigesting our food outside our body, using fire and other forms of processing that we call "cooking."
If, for some reason, we get stuck with food that requires radically more in-body processing, our descendents (or rather, Nestor's descendents) will have, on average, bigger jaws, and possibly bigger guts. This will come at the expense of brain capacity, to some degree. The stereotypical dumb jocks of today may become the nerds of the next eon.
Ironically, one straightforward way to get this is to add massive amounts of CO2 to the atmosphere. AFAIK, research shows that plants dosed with large amounts of CO2 tend to produce more foliage and less fruit. If humans are forced to become foliovores, we'll need bigger guts at the expense of brainpower. We'll become a bit more like gorillas if we can't figure out how to process the leaves down for the few nutrients they do have. Since we won't have fossil fuels to do it, we'll be limited in our processing power, and evolution may pick up the slack by favoring everyone who doesn't starve on this new diet.
]]>Yes, this. It's the one true big-S Singularity that we can point to in history; you really can't explain it to anyone on the other side, you can at best bring them over to the more advanced side and let them experience it. We've had plenty of small-s singularities, some of them driven by technological invention; the Gutenberg printing press is a common example.
Technical changes such as the industrial revolution and the invention of agriculture led to spectacular social changes, which the people at the time observed keenly. (Not everyone was a fan! We complain about spam email and porn pop-ups, but relatively speaking we've got it easy.) Many hunter-gatherers had a very good idea of what a farmer's life was like, and chose to give it a miss.
It's hard to say where the industrial/information/whatever revolution will be seen to have really taken off, but it might be around the time self-powered machinery became common (which was the same time we started using electricity). We think we're doing fancy stuff currently, but I realized years ago that I'd have no particular trouble explaining turn of the millennium technology to someone from the 1920s or 1930s. "Yes, we figured out how to make moving pictures and telephones work over radio. Faster cars and planes, yeah, we've got those. There's this thing called 'the internet,' but if you know about teletypes and automatic telephone switching I can explain how it works." Go back a few decades to, say, the 1880s and it becomes much harder.
]]>It wasn't something you couldn't have explained to Chaucer. "We have a machine which, once set up, can make a large number of identical copies of a piece of text. The cost per copy is much less than the cost of using a scribe." And Chaucer would, I am sure, see the advantages, both for a Customs Duty collector and a teller of tales. But would he see the implications for literacy?
Maybe: look at the dialect of English he wrote in. He was already seeing the importance of being understood.
]]>I just thought i'd put that in in case anyone got the wrong idea.
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