This work responds to Ray Kurzweil's "The Singularity is Near" by arguing that long before any technological singularity, there will be other events that make considerations of such a singularity event essentially irrelevant.
Whether of not anticipations of inevitabile gross unpredicability and replacement of Homo sapiens as the dominant species, at or near a technological singularity, are accurate, they are irrelevant. That is because long before any such singularity event, there will be a dehumanizing domination by a truly alien entity or entities, a System, featuring qualities properly called "mental" by any standards, such as having intentionality, or of being best categorized as mental in terms of economy of description, just as mental terminology of cognativists referring to mental events, allows for predictions thate pure behaviorists cannot accunt for, or can only do by convolutions making such accountings impracticle.
Excerpt
They're Here -
Let us take the abbreviated definition of "an AI" is an entity (indefinite article "an") that emerges from a human created ("artificial") program (set of rules, algorithm, flow chart) that are objects in true propositions that are relationships (or properties, which is a relationship with one object) that are intentional (mental). Intentionality is the key term.
That's "intention" with a "t", not "intension" with an "s" (the latter being the antonym of "extension", as in extended in space, or in logic as having referents or denotations or object instantiations). Although intentional objects (mental) have no extension (in Cartesian duality, or under Chalmers' extended mind hypothesis, which best expresses my own viewpoint), intentionality, not intensionality, is the essence of what is mental, and is a better criterion than a Turing Test ("intentionality" has potential to resolve Searle's Chinese Room problem with Turing Tests). If your are not familiar with all the above philosophy of mind/phil of computersci stuff, a more plain English version is as follows.
The "program" is DSM V. The AI is "the System" emerging from the DSM algorithm. As the google search link for "DSM and flow chart" above shows, "it" even has a form of self-replication, or reproduction, in that that system is part of a larger system of algorithms that include meta-algorithms to generate DSM V from DSM IV and additional analyzed data (... and nonsense whereby psychiatry was the paradigmatic "pseudoscience" as originally defined by Karl Popper), and similarly create DSM VI from DSM V (and analyzed data and perpetuating nonsense), etc. Here is a more concrete example. President
Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex", and the US and Soviet Union, have intentionality (e.g., "the US 'wants' to embarrass the Soviet Union", with "want" being an intentional term), and are human made (so are artificial), and at least partially arise from an algorithm (e.g. the Constitution, common law, and case law), whereby these systems are quasi-AIs or proto-AIs if the rules can be well defined enough to call it a full set of rules.
If an "alien intelligence" came to earth, it would not be artificial, but might "look" like an AI. It would "look" more like our "judicial system", than it would look like the little green men, spiders, molluscs, bushes, masses of plankton, etc., of science fiction, or even the (unconnected) light pattern of cities viewed from the sky, or the similarly "appearing" (by electromagnetic signature) internet (connected). But the judicial system does not "look" like anything. If in the future, biological life was extirpated but AIs lived on, and were initially set up to "obey the law", the judicial system might continue, so thinking of "it" as a bunch of humans in an organized behavior is not correct.
These AIs, these systems, are already here, and are "all around" us. We cannot directly sense them, but we can infer them, a larger inferential step than inferring dark matter or dark energy from observations, theories, and observation and theory laden perceptions. Their emergence, and the concept of emergence itself, may essentially involve a human or other entity inference, and thereby perception. This emergence is similar to the emergence of particles or waves from what is neither a particle or wave, which essentially involves "perception" analagous to needing "observation", in the context of the uncertaintly principle, for a particle to emerge.
A new client talks attorney Stan Turner into acting as his executor and trustee of his estate if he should die. Stan reluctantly accepts, but when the client is murdered before the ink is dry on the paperwork, Stan realizes he has been set up and mus
Assistant County Attorney Ken Anderson spends his weekends drinking and running around. After waking up with another hangover, Ken decides not to drink so much anymore. Ken and his buddy, Tony, go out to eat and see Mia Correa and Faye Kincaid at the
