Angry Robot

Singularity: the Downside

Last week I linked to a boatload of singularity-related articles and I’m still processing them. Near the bottom of Kevin Kelly’s rebuttal of Kurzweil there is a very perceptive comment from Jochen Topf:

We have already moved past some of these points: Only a hundred or two hundred years ago people could learn a job and expect to do the same job for the rest of their life. This is not true any more. We have passed the live-your-whole-life-the-same-point. And if we think this through and believe in the every-accelerating development, it is only a question of time, till we have to change jobs daily to keep up with development. But we humans can’t do that, so something has to give, something has to happen. Maybe the acceleration will slow down, maybe superhuman machine intelligence can keep up with the development and we humans will live in a world, that looks to the superhumans like the third world looks to us today.

So yeah, being fired every few hours? That’s going to be sweet.