Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?
It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.
Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some people I hung out with for a while used to talk a lot about the utility of physics intuition.
Some hypotheses for negative affect are that the story is not relevant or interesting (strong evidence this is not the case), that those people who have the technical expertise to discuss it don’t want to discuss it off secure channels or…
My reaction: You have posted a link to some invention, without explaining why it is related to singularity more than any other random technical invention. Sure, there are three hyperlinks where I can get more information, but I would like to get some explanation from the article itself. Or maybe you just use “how does X advance singularity timelines?” as a synonym for “X is cool”; I don’t know, and you didn’t help me avoid this suspicion.
What would I like to find in articles like this? A short explanation of context (for people who know nothing about carbon nanotubes, which is not a typical LW topic), and explanation of why do you think this invention is exceptional (even when compared with hundred other inventions made and published in the same year). Something like this—the following text is completely made up, just to better illustrate what I mean:
Estimates of Singularity timeline are often based on the Moore’s law. However, in recent years the progress in computer speeds has slowed down. Computers are not getting faster anymore. Their increased power is mostly gained by adding more processor cores, which is not the same as making faster cores. Also the electric power consumption increases linearly with the number of cores, so even if in 2050 we get a computer capable of simulating a human brain, it would require more power than is produced by Sun. One possible solution is to avoid an integrated-circuit approach and build the computer directly, atom by atom. (Just like we got a thousandfold increase in capacity and speed by replacing vacuum tubes by integrated circuits in 1960s.) To make it possible, we need a material that is able to do—blah blah blah—but material with such properties is not known yet. However, recent experiments with carbon nanotubes suggest that they are similar to what we need. More details about physical properties of carbon nanotubes are here: [1], [2], [3].
Any you don’t have to put “Singularity” in the name of the article. “Recent advances in carbon nanotubes research” would work fine.
Or maybe you just use “how does X advance singularity timelines?”
Very much not this. I was a visiting fellow at singinst and discussed timelines with many people. I still feel some level of ethical obligation to provide a more complete analysis as I was actually converted to have some worry about this recursive self improvement, though I tend to worry more about IA than AI (even if just because of the IA-->AI path) I’m also poking a little bit at the LW codebase again and wanted to try to stimulate a discussion and explore the site. I was looking for actual discussion of the impact of this on people’s timelines, how they are updating on this kind of evidence.
Any you don’t have to put “Singularity” in the name of the article.
It’s interesting to note that I put singularity and timelines plural, implying this trajectory towards “methusalarity” or whatever you want to call it. I linked the other article to show there is some evidence that this particular advance might very well unlock a lot of tech along a lot of interesting, rapidly accelerating change technologies.
A short explanation of context
I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better? If you check out the link, this was published in nature nanotech, so that is pretty big news. I linked to papers on tissue engineering, nanotech used internally. That’s three pieces of a puzzle that we’re all trying to get a better handle on.
Something like this
I think that’s a good introductory description, but I thought people on this site already know all this. I think they know moore’s law has stalled and that we’re looking to increase it, that we’re right on the cusp of the computational power required to search solution spaces near the human scale (watson, go ais, deep blue, etc)
So, what techs will change that space… carbon nanotubes and graphene wires are taken pretty seriously. If our mutual goal is to get ahead of this problem, it seems we should all take the time to do the basic reading and you come to certain concepts—heat dissipation, scaling out rather than up, 3D chips, transistor sizes, nanotechnology, graphene and carbon nanotubes, cloud computing, bot nets, cortical columns, human computer interface, neuronal destruction due to wire thickness and so forth.
It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone’s puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond, thank you for your insights, need to run back to code...
Thanks for explanation. Now my model is that you consider carbon nanotubes very important technology for increasing computational power (more than many other hardware-related technologies), so they are also a very important component in calculating Singularity timeline. Makes sense, though I lack the knowledge necessary to discuss it.
I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better?
Because they were writing for a different audience—for people who already know a lot of context.
Now it’s your choice whether you want to discuss with an average LessWronger, in which case you should provide more content, or you want to discuss only with people who are experts in some area, which is completely legitimate, but perhaps you should state it more explicitly.
It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone’s puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond
That’s good. I was hoping you will not get the impression that we are somehow biased against discussing singularity or carbon. :D
I think it tends to be most useful to do things that support multiple different plans, so I had a lot of motives for putting this up here. I don’t have a lot of time, so that’s how I try to roll anyway...
Here is what my motivations were :
In general play with the site—I did a little bit of work on it in the summer of 2010 and I was talking about making a contribution again, so I wanted to play with the interface and understand the code better.
I enjoyed my time at singinst, but was one of the rare people that had never read lesswrong when I arrived there (having found the post on hacker news) so it was an effort to reach out to the community
I deliberately didn’t write much about a topic that I have reason to believe should be interesting to this community, so it was a good level set for the community’s tech level, curiosity and so forth. Definitely more open to stuff than the average forum, but was surprised, would have thought people would be all over this as a weird idea.
definitely not just looking for expert opinions, I do think CNTs are very important and I want to encourage you and everyone else to let your imagination run wild a bit and say what you think, if it’s too dangerous to discuss fine, but I doubt most think that…
for experts that want to set me straight or point out some obvious reason these techs are not useful, let me know but since we are already using CNTs to replace thermal paste for heat sinks so can we do a full chip etc...
Curious if people would be willing to articulate negative sentiment on this piece?
It seems like we should all see advancements like this as a way of training our intuition about how the tech tree will go and also make efforts to do outreach into important communities as they are growing. If graphene transistor and remote cooling cpus eclipse efforts in parallelism or biological computing, then researchers in that field have a lot of influence to spread to users as well as developers.
Also, to most people this is a highly counterintuitive phenomenon and some people I hung out with for a while used to talk a lot about the utility of physics intuition.
Some hypotheses for negative affect are that the story is not relevant or interesting (strong evidence this is not the case), that those people who have the technical expertise to discuss it don’t want to discuss it off secure channels or…
My reaction: You have posted a link to some invention, without explaining why it is related to singularity more than any other random technical invention. Sure, there are three hyperlinks where I can get more information, but I would like to get some explanation from the article itself. Or maybe you just use “how does X advance singularity timelines?” as a synonym for “X is cool”; I don’t know, and you didn’t help me avoid this suspicion.
What would I like to find in articles like this? A short explanation of context (for people who know nothing about carbon nanotubes, which is not a typical LW topic), and explanation of why do you think this invention is exceptional (even when compared with hundred other inventions made and published in the same year). Something like this—the following text is completely made up, just to better illustrate what I mean:
Estimates of Singularity timeline are often based on the Moore’s law. However, in recent years the progress in computer speeds has slowed down. Computers are not getting faster anymore. Their increased power is mostly gained by adding more processor cores, which is not the same as making faster cores. Also the electric power consumption increases linearly with the number of cores, so even if in 2050 we get a computer capable of simulating a human brain, it would require more power than is produced by Sun. One possible solution is to avoid an integrated-circuit approach and build the computer directly, atom by atom. (Just like we got a thousandfold increase in capacity and speed by replacing vacuum tubes by integrated circuits in 1960s.) To make it possible, we need a material that is able to do—blah blah blah—but material with such properties is not known yet. However, recent experiments with carbon nanotubes suggest that they are similar to what we need. More details about physical properties of carbon nanotubes are here: [1], [2], [3].
Any you don’t have to put “Singularity” in the name of the article. “Recent advances in carbon nanotubes research” would work fine.
Very much not this. I was a visiting fellow at singinst and discussed timelines with many people. I still feel some level of ethical obligation to provide a more complete analysis as I was actually converted to have some worry about this recursive self improvement, though I tend to worry more about IA than AI (even if just because of the IA-->AI path) I’m also poking a little bit at the LW codebase again and wanted to try to stimulate a discussion and explore the site. I was looking for actual discussion of the impact of this on people’s timelines, how they are updating on this kind of evidence.
It’s interesting to note that I put singularity and timelines plural, implying this trajectory towards “methusalarity” or whatever you want to call it. I linked the other article to show there is some evidence that this particular advance might very well unlock a lot of tech along a lot of interesting, rapidly accelerating change technologies.
I posted the most relevant abstract. If they spent some fairly large time writing that, why should I assume I can do better? If you check out the link, this was published in nature nanotech, so that is pretty big news. I linked to papers on tissue engineering, nanotech used internally. That’s three pieces of a puzzle that we’re all trying to get a better handle on.
I think that’s a good introductory description, but I thought people on this site already know all this. I think they know moore’s law has stalled and that we’re looking to increase it, that we’re right on the cusp of the computational power required to search solution spaces near the human scale (watson, go ais, deep blue, etc)
So, what techs will change that space… carbon nanotubes and graphene wires are taken pretty seriously. If our mutual goal is to get ahead of this problem, it seems we should all take the time to do the basic reading and you come to certain concepts—heat dissipation, scaling out rather than up, 3D chips, transistor sizes, nanotechnology, graphene and carbon nanotubes, cloud computing, bot nets, cortical columns, human computer interface, neuronal destruction due to wire thickness and so forth.
It is indeed kind of mean that I ask how this piece fits into everyone’s puzzle without disclosing my puzzle, but I do worry about security and that sort of thing and this was a good experiment on how people would respond, thank you for your insights, need to run back to code...
Thanks for explanation. Now my model is that you consider carbon nanotubes very important technology for increasing computational power (more than many other hardware-related technologies), so they are also a very important component in calculating Singularity timeline. Makes sense, though I lack the knowledge necessary to discuss it.
Because they were writing for a different audience—for people who already know a lot of context.
Now it’s your choice whether you want to discuss with an average LessWronger, in which case you should provide more content, or you want to discuss only with people who are experts in some area, which is completely legitimate, but perhaps you should state it more explicitly.
That’s good. I was hoping you will not get the impression that we are somehow biased against discussing singularity or carbon. :D
I think it tends to be most useful to do things that support multiple different plans, so I had a lot of motives for putting this up here. I don’t have a lot of time, so that’s how I try to roll anyway...
Here is what my motivations were :
In general play with the site—I did a little bit of work on it in the summer of 2010 and I was talking about making a contribution again, so I wanted to play with the interface and understand the code better.
I enjoyed my time at singinst, but was one of the rare people that had never read lesswrong when I arrived there (having found the post on hacker news) so it was an effort to reach out to the community
I deliberately didn’t write much about a topic that I have reason to believe should be interesting to this community, so it was a good level set for the community’s tech level, curiosity and so forth. Definitely more open to stuff than the average forum, but was surprised, would have thought people would be all over this as a weird idea.
definitely not just looking for expert opinions, I do think CNTs are very important and I want to encourage you and everyone else to let your imagination run wild a bit and say what you think, if it’s too dangerous to discuss fine, but I doubt most think that…
for experts that want to set me straight or point out some obvious reason these techs are not useful, let me know but since we are already using CNTs to replace thermal paste for heat sinks so can we do a full chip etc...