Waiting In The Wings

[andrewducker]

"Humans Need Not Apply" (Watch on YouTube)

Made by ciphergoth.

(And Great Leap Forward, in this context refers to this, not China.)

Comments

[marrog.livejournal.com]

I think the best descriptor I've heard for a sense of scale about time is from Bryson's Brief History of Nearly Everything where he says that if you stretch you arms out either side of you, humans have been around for about the length of the growth on one of your fingernails.

[andrewducker]

We really are delightfully insignificant!

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

And the obvious question is - what significant milestone comes after the internet? :)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Machines that can build themselves and think faster than us.

[the-locster.livejournal.com]

OK, and what's the next one after that? :)

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Extinction of Mankind.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Do you mean this in an SIAI "unFriendly AI" sense?

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Well, I don't really mean it at all.

Still, the idea of machines designing and building better versions of themselves could result in a runaway success (from the machines' POV). Though if the machines were really intelligent they might decide not too, instead of making themselves obsolete.

The problem with machine intelligence is motivation. You need feelings (or consciousness or whatever) to consider anything worth doing. Otherwise doing nothing has equal value as protecting yourself or anything else you care to think of.

Motivation could be programmed into machines (while still being designed by humans), but it won't be a substitute for true feelings (or consciousness or whatever).

I think we'll be underwhelmed by attempts at machine intelligence for a long time to come.

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

Oh - and a nice little video!

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

The last hundred or so years really need more points in it to give a better indication of the acceleration of recent human developments. The telegraph to represent speeded up communications, not to mention flight, space-flight, computers, the cracking of DNA, etc.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Hm, there's oddly no space-flight on there at all - no Sputnik, Gagarin or Apollo moon landing.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

TBH recent times weren't my main focus - what I wanted to try and show was how the scale of modern time looks on the overall scale of all time. But I'd love to find a way to make it easy for lots of people to edit the list of events. Thanks for the comments!

[stillcarl.livejournal.com]

I'm kinda impressed by how fast we can travel now, given we were stuck at much the same speed as the ancient Egyptians up until the steam train came along. And I read once that Gagarin traveled five times faster than any human had before, which is a huge jump in the graph! (I've not checked the accuracy of that though.) You'd need a different kind of video to show this though.

[strawberryfrog.livejournal.com]

Wonderful and impressive.