General Discussion The Singularity and Judaism

[a_Sarah]

Boy Rabbi, you sure can break things down to its foundation.

Jewish wisdom is hard to define objectively. Its something part of the culture of Judaism. I can see it in people like Einstein and Kurzweil. Its too abstract to really define what it is. I just notice it.

Though controversial, some have done research and found that Ashkenazi Jews are generally more intelligent than the average person.

I am not assuming everyone is fundamentalist and orthodox, I was just testing the waters to see who would be interested in singularitarianism.

I "naturally" looked because I see some similarities between singularitarianism and Jewish tanakh. I feel like it would be a fun challenge to combine the two into one. Isaiah and Ezekiel both are early futurists in my opinion.

Why is my opinion off tracks?

Ah, I just asked about how you connect the singularity and Kurzweil's thoughts in your other thread, this one answers my questions a bit. I am interested, from a philosophical perspective, in what Kurzweil has to say. 
But I need to clarify that his postponing the arrival of the singularity has become a running gag among colleagues from my faculty (in fact one even made it her goal in life to outlive Kurzweil simply out of spite for his claims regarding immortality) and while I do believe that AI will eventually surpass human level intelligence (especially with AIs that train each other, which we already have), it is rather insignificant, to me, since human level intelligence is just an arbitrary point that we set from our perspective, so why should AI algorithms have this human-centric ceiling. In fact, we already do have algorithms that initially train on humans, then continue their "studies" on their own (by practicing against themselves) only to emerge better than most human players, for example in Starcraft II- Sure, this is narrow AI, but I think it is just a matter of time until we reach a generalized AI. But if it will be beneficial will be another question and this is where I think Kurzweil needs to curb his enthusiasm a bit. We modelled the AI to fullfill tasks that we hope they will be better at than us and succeeded, then we modelled them because we thought they could NOT be better than us (creativity, imagination) and still succeeded. The MABA MABA lists are shrinking ((hu)mans are better at, machines are better at, originally introduced for function allocation in Human Machine contexts). 

But while we see those successes and while many algorithms use simplified structures based on biological brains (neural networks), we also see that the kind of intelligence is at the same time very human like, but also alien. There are AI algorithms at work that help people set up experiments for quantum entangelment, which is hard for scientists to do since the setups are somewhat counter intuitive and non-predictable. The AI did it and managed to find more and even more efficient setups. This is beneficial (and still narrow), but if you'd start to apply AI logic to human needs, emotional, personal ones, the helpfulness might shift. I think it was Nick Bostrom who wrote about the example of a generalized AI we'd ask to show us the path to happiness - who might decide the easiest path would be to stimulate our dopamine centres, task achieved. 

There have been warnings from scientists such as Stephen Hawking and even an open letter persisting on focussing to make the generalized AI a beneficial one. I hope for a beneficial version, but I am very sceptical (I'm more with Nick Bostrom here - once you open the box, it is out). So for me, it is not the "big revelation", the one huge development everything is waiting for, but an undertaking that has to be done in moderation, with worldwide combined efforts and in adherence to guidelines that should help us avoid negative consequences. I think that the risks actually outweigh the benefits, at least, if we wish to continue life as we know it. If AI is more capable than us in every single aspect, what will be left? What will be our purpose? I am not speaking about losing jobs, this is a development where society needs to react anyway should we start to leave the age of work for living. I'm speaking about living a fullfilled live in a world where AI can do anything better than you. Play better, draw better, make better poetry, tell better jokes...will we still have place in that picture?

So, I apologize for this long wall of text, but this is a topic where you can just say "Singularity" and the room of five students produces ten different opinions. By the way, this is the only parallel I see to Judaism.