X-Message-Number: 25473
References: <>
From: Peter Merel <>
Subject: The Singularity Is A Fantasy
Date: Wed, 5 Jan 2005 21:49:44 +1100

Mark Plus asks about the whereabouts of the nanotech singularity. Any 
Computer Scientist worth their salt can tell him - in his dreams.

Here's why: No one has the foggiest idea how to command, control, or 
even orient just a single robot in a physical environment anywhere near 
as complex and demanding as that of an assembler.

The nanotech apologists' counter to this is that, with the advent of 
assemblers, real AI is just around the corner, and this AI can easily 
handle the command and control issues of an assembler. Or a pound of 
assemblers together. No worries.

The trouble is this assumes the antecedent - that you can command and 
control a pound of assemblers well enough for them to express coherent 
cognitive behaviors in order to create the command and control 
necessary for their own operation ... Catch-22. As computer science 
stands at present we have about as much chance of creating real AI in a 
pound of assemblers as we have of creating it in a ton of PCs. Which is 
to say, none.

And the reason for that is also well known to any Computer Scientist 
worth their salt: all AI technologies founder on combinatorial 
complexity under a Turing/Von Neumann computing paradigm. You can get 
your expert system/neural net to pull cute tricks in small domains, but 
the moment you try to scale up, the time and space requirements of your 
program go exponential. In the last fifty years no one has been able to 
demonstrate any significant way around this "combinatorial explosion".

This is not to say we may not hope for an AI breakthrough some time in 
the future. It may be that quantum computing or a non-Turing 
computational paradigm will enable the requisite nanotech command and 
control process, and then we can all breathe a sigh of ... well, I 
don't know if you've watched "Forbidden Planet" recently, but perhaps 
relief isn't the right word.

Peter Merel.

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