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What Does a Beer Taste Like After the Singularity?

popularmechanics.com — When a kooky-sounding technology theory gains enough intellectual momentum to have its own conference, with smart people discussing it and venture capitalists talking about investing in it — it's worth stopping by to listen. Here's the latest word from the 2009 Singularity Summit.

Who dugg this? Made popular Oct 5, 2009

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  • radicaldementia, on 10/05/2009, -0/+37The more I think about this, the freakier it gets.

    The author argues that if humans augment their brains to the point where we're basically the same as machines, then we won't be able to enjoy the simple pleasures like a cheeseburger. But why do we enjoy cheeseburgers in the first place? Mostly because they taste good and make us not hungry. But if, as machine-people, we have complete control over our own senses, then we could easily simulate the cheeseburger with precise taste. We could also simulate our own hunger, so eating the imaginary cheeseburger is just as satisfying as the real one. We could probably make the simulation even better than real life.

    But forget the cheeseburger, actually forget your sense of taste altogether. We could create entirely new senses, ones that have absolutely no real-world analogue. Think for a moment about something that you have done or want to do that would make you the happiest person in the world. Something that would be so incredibly amazing that it would be like a religious experience. Now imagine if you could simulate some abstract experience that made you 1000 times happier than that, maybe a billion times happier. Suddenly, everything achievable in the real world seems completely mundane and dull. Or maybe forget the entire concept of senses, just flip the "happy" switch, hell just forget the switch and simply exist in a perpetual state of meaningless, absolute bliss.

    In a Freudian sense, everything we do serves the purpose to fulfill some deep subconscious desire. As humans, we cannot directly satisfy these desires, so we do things in the real world that can bring us as close as possible to this intangible satisfaction. But if we make the human mind a machine, the subconscious becomes as tangible as some memory addresses, and literally everything we do, everything, becomes pointless.
  • EddiePotato, on 10/05/2009, -1/+29"Or maybe forget the entire concept of senses, just flip the "happy" switch, hell just forget the switch and simply exist in a perpetual state of meaningless, absolute bliss."

    This is the path drug addicts have been choosing for generations.
  • footbag01, on 10/05/2009, -0/+13It would be both infinitely flavorful and infinitely bland.
  • zephc, on 10/05/2009, -1/+10Your beer will be so cold, it will form into a Bose-Einstein condensate.

    Ahhh... refreshing!
  • grahag, on 10/05/2009, -0/+9And now imagine that you could copy and SHARE those feelings with others. How awesome would that be? Want someone to share your happiness at the birth/creation of your child? Share it with them. Want someone to truly understand the loss of a pet? Share it. A whole new industry will pop up around experiences and information.

    It's not all unicorn farts and rainbows, but the upside is WAY bigger than the downside I think.
  • pixeldust, on 10/05/2009, -0/+9" Now imagine if you could simulate some abstract experience that made you 1000 times happier than that, maybe a billion times happier."

    So (good)cocaine? What you describe is basically why people do drugs.
  • jec68, on 10/05/2009, -0/+8"So to sum up: The singularity is a brilliant mental exercise with which to ponder our technological future, but if any computer becomes self-aware enough to start refining its own intelligence at an accelerated rate, I'm going to unplug that thing and take a baseball bat to it."

    So would the author brutally murder the AI engineer who performs the last step towards creating this entity? If he is coherent, he would. Pretty bad article overall. It presents only the most surface-level discussion about the singularity and its implications. A few hours of watching some videos on the subject will put you at an intellectually superior position to that of the author.
  • phlyphl69, on 10/05/2009, -0/+8Well done Sir...
  • ldailey06, on 10/05/2009, -0/+7Once we hit the singularity, the machines will brew beer better than any we've ever tasted
  • Amadeus2490, on 10/05/2009, -1/+7The author argues that if humans augment their brains to the point where we're basically the same as machines, then we won't be able to enjoy the simple pleasures like a cheeseburger. But why do we enjoy cheeseburgers in the first place? Mostly because they taste good and make us not hungry. But if, as machine-people, we have complete control over our own senses, then we could easily simulate the cheeseburger with precise taste. We could also simulate our own hunger, so eating the imaginary cheeseburger is just as satisfying as the real one. We could probably make the simulation even better than real life."

    Tasty Wheat.
  • fohf, on 10/05/2009, -0/+5Which is why everything tastes like chicken.
  • Metadrew, on 10/05/2009, -1/+6Interestingly, Bud Light actually has the exact same code as water in this computer world.
  • wonderchemist, on 10/05/2009, -1/+6Impossibly dense... Oh wait, not that singularity...
  • inactive, on 10/06/2009, -0/+4I don't think so, you give your consciousness too much value. You basically are the concept that you are yourself, coupled with a feedback system that reinforces that. I could copy paste you and you'd think it worked perfectly, as soon as you woke up. Every time you go into a deep dreamless drug induced sleep you die in you're sense. Your life is really the concept you are living.
  • TrevorBelmont, on 10/05/2009, -0/+3What if your brain was gradually electronically augmented with more and more of your mental tasks being performed mechanically. After enough upgrades and time, your brain would be nearly all computer and the bio-mass in your skull would be largely irrelevant to what makes you "you". It would allow for a persistence of consciousness even after you replaced that last bit of gray matter. You would actually be the "copy" of your own mind.
    As an aside, the transporter on Star Trek worked just as you are describing. The computer would make a blue print of your body and brain by tearing it apart. It would then assemble you from a different but virtually identical set of molecules at your target destination. It kinda freaks me out to think about that.
  • mindfolded, on 10/06/2009, -0/+3I read that as What Does a Bear Taste Like After the Singularity.
  • TheDiggAbides, on 10/05/2009, -0/+3I enjoy humanity, I enjoy life, all of its pleasures as well as all of its faults. Maybe its just my own deficient mental capacity that prevents me from expressing my reasons eloquently but I'll sum up how I feel with the following quote, attributed to Federico Fellini who was asked if he used LSD to enhance his craft:

    "When everything is beautiful, nothing is beautiful."

    Without organic pain or pleasure I see no point in life.
  • yocouchdigga, on 10/05/2009, -0/+3A brain-machine interface solves that issue relatively quickly and would likely happen before full consciousness uploading.
  • TrevorBelmont, on 10/05/2009, -2/+5I don't think it's "a kooky sounding theory". It's a "kooky sounding inevitability".
  • inactive, on 10/06/2009, -0/+2yes but if you died, and brain activity stoped, but you were then revived

    The copy isn't you only becuase there is another you to know he is not the copy. If you were to die, and then be restarted as a machine your perception would be that you awoke.

    If I blew out my brains and a million years from now there was a simulation of me that survived, it would be like waking up, because the self is the concept of self, that would exist as soon as you mentally realize it.

    once your memories are fed in then your mind creates your "self".
  • PatrickFlorida, on 10/05/2009, -0/+2My virtual self will demand an alcohol equivalent.
  • ocean17, on 10/06/2009, -0/+2"The Singularity is Near" [repeat alongside every Kurzweil book release, ad nauseum].
  • disappointed, on 10/05/2009, -0/+2"So would the author brutally murder the AI engineer who performs the last step towards creating this entity?"

    No he wouldn't. Why kill a man when you can just beat up his machine with a baseball bat? It's the difference between abortion and killing a pregnant woman.
  • grahag, on 10/06/2009, -0/+2Logical thinking that's required for design and efficiency is exactly what a computer does best.

    Abstract thinking, which we do on an analog basis is what WE do best.

    It's taken so long, because the process is done using human evolution, which is done over generations, which are currently about 20-30 years apart. When you can have a generation that can grow exponentially though, with significant improvements in each generation, your efficiency and speed grow nearly exponentially with it.

    Using nanofabrication, computers will be able to design and build themselves as fast as it takes to come up with the next design. If we're fortunate, we'll enjoy all the boons of that process.
  • TrevorBelmont, on 10/05/2009, -0/+2Irony.
  • malex, on 10/06/2009, -0/+2Only if you believe that the Mayans were history's greatest IT professionals.
  • grahag, on 10/06/2009, -0/+2So if you're gradually replaced by machine parts, you lose your humanity? At what point is that humanity gone? What about people with pacemakers or brain implants for Parkinson's disease, or even an artificial hip? We're not LESS human because of our corrections or improvements. We're as human as we've ever been. It's where humanity is going.

    There will be those holdouts that need to stay "natural" in order to enjoy life, and I honestly have NO problem with that at all. Enjoy your humanity the way you want. I'll compare my humanity 200 years down the road with yours and we'll see where we're at. :)

    The things that make life worth living are the experiences you have. You'll even get to decide when you don't want to be around anymore. How many of us can make that decision now and be at peace with it and with everyone around us? Not many, I'd wager.
  • dafragsta, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1I think the machine will always require an organic element to be truly subjective. Like any other machine, it will require an operator in some state to truly realize it's potential.
  • nick2525, on 10/19/2009, -0/+1A war against the machines is no longer sci fi. It is only a matter of time now.
  • CaptainCool53, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1Would you mind explaining that to the rest of us?
  • Culyt, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1I liked The Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect: http://www.kuro5hin.org/prime-intellect/

    In it a AI with some kind of funky quantum processor and the basic 3 Asimov laws of robotics (since its just a demonstration, prototype the creator didn't think too long about it), takes control of the universe and can rearrange matter at will and refuses to allow anyone to die or the creator to fix things. The creator managed to add an extra rule before things got singularityish, that stated the AI couldn't reverse engineer the human mind and learn what people where thinking or going to do by reading their neurons directly or simulating them (ie keep free will).

    There are billions of humans in a vegetable state, where they have asked the system to directly stimulate the brains pleasure neurons (found by a brute force scan of them as the AI isn't allowed to know).
  • swagv, on 10/05/2009, -0/+1Buried for old news. Skynet already become self-aware at 2:14 a.m. ET on 8/29/1997.
  • dafragsta, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1I disagree. If humans could gain no joy from doing things that have no impact in the real world, people wouldn't throw their lives away on WoW. It's just a ***** game.

    I consider myself one of those people who believes in spirituality in ONLY that there is something ethereal floating around in our beings, but beyond that, there are no specifics. It's up to us to figure out what it means on our own and not to buy into any of the mass produced answers to that question, but for my personal afterlife or singularity happy land, I think I could be happy persisting in a world of evolving creation. If I had the ability to create anything I wanted, any scenario, any possible past moment in time, or even just to live in perpetuity doing corporeal creative things while listening to music of my choosing, I don't think nirvana needs to be much more complex.

    The only thing I want aside from eternal bliss is persistence of context. If I think too fast, I can simulate a slower clock on my instance of consciousness in the singularity. You don't have to live at the speed of light just because you can choose to operate at it. Life is nothing more than a series of experiences that you reflect upon over time with different insight.
  • Culyt, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1The singularity would almost definitely make you immortal (or at least close too it, the universe itself does have a time limit, although you can speed up your brain to make everything last longer too). If it doesn't then we are are probably ***** any way since something went horribly wrong.

    'Joy' doesn't care if you are having an impact on anything else, it's a chemical reaction in your brain. There is probably an upper limit of the amount of joy you can experience, however in experiments rats have starved to death hitting a 'happy' switch continuously rather than eating food right next to them, not to mention heroin addicts. So unfortunately for us that upper limit is too high.

    We are kind of ***** in the long term, you might not go straight for the direct brain stimulation, but in the long term happiness is basically a drug, it starts out as enjoying art, a good time with friends, normal sex, being able to have sex basically continuously by removing limitations on the body/libido, just stimulating you brain a bit to give you a nice buzz to eventually being a dolling pleasure vegetable.

    The only way around it I can see is some kind of limit on how much joy you give yourself, which means you basically have to make yourself artificially depressed to counteract the joy levels, or just put in some fixed upper limit (of course you would probably bump this limit up a little by little over time, like a drug addict).

    Otherwise you need to make fundamental changes to your brain, specifically what drives you. Remove emotions, or change them in some way/ Maybe put them as some kind of artificial layer that you are detached from, in some sense making them fake although still effecting your mind in the same way so you don't act any different.
  • trolleyfan, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1Sure - just as soon as you explain where you've been through three "Terminator" movies and a TV show...
  • InsomniacAgent, on 10/09/2009, -0/+1Although it's not entirely bliss. It's mostly down time, sucking dick for cash.
  • ByteGuerilla, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1What if the machines didn't know what a religious experience felt like?
  • supergoopinator, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1Well done...
  • NikoKun, on 11/05/2009, -0/+1It really is an incredible thing to think about.

    I was reading Accelerando over the summer... Just imagine one day, if we merge our selves into our technology, becoming digital beings instead of biological. Basically immortality, but so much more. A whole new level of being. We will think things we could never comprehend right now.

    I just hope all this comes in the next 50 years, before I die, and miss out on all the fun. At the rate of current technology progression, and the rate at which current projects are starting to understand the brain... I don't see this stuff being impossible anymore.
  • Culyt, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1The other thing, is does it matter if you loose your 'humanity', you could gain something better.

    The problem with organic pain or pleasure is that it can be hacked. Currently by drugs for example. Scientists have put a chip in a rats brain that provided pleasure when the rat flicked a switch. The rat starved to death.

    Some woman got a implant in her brain that accidentally triggered the pleasure centres too. She got addicted to it, and actually sued the scientists to make them put it back in.

    In the future you could potentially just hit the 'pleasure me' button and get a direct neural stimulation. You wouldn't stop hitting it.

    In some sense its not too different from say internet porn, just more efficient and cutting out the inefficient bits (such as your sex drive only being so high, and physical limitations of your body). On the other hand those inefficiencies stop you from doing nothing but internet porn continuously until the point you starve to death.
  • Culyt, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1Even if the machine is 'sentient', people are not perfect logical things.

    If you give someone a choice of killing a person with a baseball bat, or the choice of pushing a magic button that will randomly kill 2 people, chosen randomly on the planet in just as a painful way as the bat death, but the choose won't ever see happen, there are probably quite a few people that will choose the button.

    This would be even further since its the difference between smashing up a computer, and killing a person, the mind just wouldn't conceive of the computer as being a 'person'.
  • disappointed, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1People waste time on WoW because it's a social game. It's a way for people to interact with others. It's basically an elaborate chat room. And if it makes them so happy, why do you say they are throwing their lives away?

    I chose the word "joy" to differentiate it from hormonal pleasure. I'm talking about being happy for a reason. You can't ignore the role of your conciousness in this. I need the concious part of my brain to know why I'm happy for me to be truly happy.

    I'm saying that what would make me happy would be something which makes someone else happy too. I would have to know that I wasn't just idling away my time until entropy consumes me.

    The only way the machine could recreate that would be by completely fooling me about my reality. I don't see that as being something I'd choose, even if I knew I'd spend the rest of eternity in a state of pure bliss.

    Also, the singularity wouldn't guarantee immortality. It's not a perfect machine, it's just technology that can improve itself faster than we can improve it. And improve is a subjective term. Personally I think it's just a futurist's wet dream.
  • JohnGalt750, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1It's not as different as you think.

    Consider that there are medical procedures you can have where fully half of your brain can be removed (hemispherectomy) and yet you still live, think, talk, and act like yourself (with minor side effects). What if instead of a removal a transplant were possible and the other half ended up in a new body. There would be two of "you".

    If you say that only the "full brain" with all it's neurons is the only "true" you then how do you account for all the neurons that die and are recreated? You would literally be a different person in a few years by that definition. At first you may think "of course people change so much over the years that makes sense". The other side of that is that the person you were as a child is already "dead".

    If you saved a "copy" of yourself along the way it will remain more like "you" of that time than you yourself will.
  • Arachnivore, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1"In a totally networked world of computerized minds, the idea of compartmentalized thoughts unique to individuals would be, at best, an artificial construct—as would the conventional ideas of privacy and individual will that are the hallmarks of humanity."

    I think the author is jumping to conclusions here.
    If humans migrated their mental capacity to artificial hardware, it makes sense to imagine us connecting to each other in a network-like fashion, however this situation does not necessarily beget a unified, hive-mind, consciousness. It's still generally more efficient to distribute computing tasks (such as the task of observing the universe) to individual sub-units. It makes sense that we would retain our individuality because it is more efficient to do so.
  • hereticoftruth, on 10/07/2009, -0/+1Answer: The same. How many singularities can fit on the head of a pin? All of them. What did one singularity say to the other? Nothing. Singularities aren't outgoing at all. 1st singularity: "You said you wouldn't laugh!". 2nd singularity: "Yeah: But I didn't know you would pick the ugliest one in the herd!". Yup. Those singularity conventioneers sure are witty and intelligent! Free singularities tomorrow!
  • InfinitySnatch, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1It would taste just as dangerous, I presume.
  • InfinitySnatch, on 10/06/2009, -0/+1"So to sum up: The singularity is a brilliant mental exercise with which to ponder our technological future, but if any computer becomes self-aware enough to start refining its own intelligence at an accelerated rate, I'm going to unplug that thing and take a baseball bat to it."

    So to sum up: The author in all his glorious ignorance would wantonly destroy the absolute pinnacle of mankind's achievements. This subject makes it easy to figure out who the true enemies of mankind will be in the near future.
  • Spoomeister, on 10/06/2009, -1/+2Stop with the singularity nonsense. Just, stop.

    It's Nerd Rapture.
  • shhawkins, on 10/08/2009, -0/+1Or we could bomb the world to bits before any of this could happen.
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