Singularity

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The Mirage of the Financial Singularity

Ray Kurzweil A university for the coming singularity

The question is, is there a positive social singularity?

Because I had them through 2002 in my book, The Singularity is Near.

This imagined state of affairs might be called the financial singularity, analogous to the hypothetical future technological singularity, when computers replace human intelligence. The financial singularity implies that all investment decisions would be better left to a computer program, because the experts with their algorithms have figured out what drives market outcomes and reduced it to a seamless system.

Based on that we are announcing, here at TED, in true TED tradition, Singularity University.

And that's where my imagined future comes in, which I am going to call the social singularity.

I've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called Singularity University based in Silicon Valley.

And then what we see in the singularity, that prophesized by Kurzweil and others his idea that technology is accelerating evolution.

News accounts depict hordes of emotional people trading on hunch and superstition. That looks a lot more like reality than all the talk of impending financial singularity.

(c) The need to give equal treatment to all forms of racism and discrimination while recognizing the singularity and specificity of each form of discrimination and racism

Eliezer Yudkowsky, one of the founders of The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, believes that singularity will lead to an intelligence explosion as super intelligent machines design even more intelligent machines, with each generation repeating this process. The more cautious Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence has set up a special panel to study what it calls the potential for loss of human control of computer based intelligences.

It may be that the social singularity ahead is the one that we fear the most a convergence of catastrophes, of environmental degradation, of weapons of mass destruction, of pandemics, of poverty.

Ray Kurzweil's latest graphs show that technology's breakneck advances will only accelerate recession or not. He unveils his new project, Singularity University, to study oncoming tech and guide it to benefit humanity.

(ii) The close and fundamental link between the spiritual, historical and cultural singularity of each of these phobias and the universality of their underlying causes and of the efforts needed to combat them

The Grossman Stiglitz conundrum seems less compelling in the financial singularity if we can imagine that computers direct all the investment decisions. Although alpha may be vanishingly small, it still represents enough profit to keep the computers running.

In the Special Rapporteur's view, any study of this increase in Islamophobia should be based on both the historical, theological and contextual singularity of this phobia and the universality of the underlying causes of the defamation of religions.

Many of you will realize that I'm ripping a bit off of the science fiction writer Vernor Vinge's notion of a technological singularity, where a number of trends accelerate and converge and come together to create, really, a shockingly new reality.

That study and the note by the Secretariat accompanying the present draft convention state that it has so far not been possible to develop a wholly satisfactory solution to ensure this singularity or originality (A CN.9 577 Add.1, para.37).

The idea of financial singularity may seem inspiring but it is no less illusory than the rational Utopia that inspired generations of central planners. Human judgment, good and bad, will drive investment decisions and financial market outcomes for the rest of our lives and beyond.

Mr. Caprioli (France) said that he supported the United States delegation's view regarding draft paragraphs 4 and 5 and agreed with the distinction drawn between an environment in which the uniqueness of an original was important, as in the case of negotiable instruments which were not covered by the draft convention, and an environment in which singularity was not required.

Under such circumstances, it seems surprising that article 9, in paragraphs 4 and 5, should purport to define the electronic equivalent of an original when it does not make such equivalence subject to the requirement of singularity of the original, which is intrinsically linked to the very function and nature of an original, and will thus be unable to address the question of the transfer of a negotiable instrument.