How does (great) past suffering justify (mild) modern suffering?
And my forefathers probably fought in wars against your forefathers. The world would have probably been better off, if they all had just stayed home. Nothing glorious about that.
Love me some nonsensical medieval illustrations. Compare and contrast to 2023 illustration of Blemmyes (from a game I was working on a couple years ago):
One only needs to look at Horizon: Zero Dawn to note that the truth of this is deeply uneven across the games industry. World streaming architectures are incredible technical achievements. So are moddable engines. There are plenty of technical limits being pushed by devs, it's just not done at all levels.
You are right, but you picked a game by a studio known for its technical expertise, with plenty of points to prove about quality game development. I'd like them to be the future of this industry.
But right now, 8-9/10 game developers and publishers are deeply concerned with cash and rather unconcerned by technical excellence or games as a form of interactive art (where, once again, Guerrilla and many other Sony studios are).
Um. The Singularity isn't religious in its origin. It's literally a reference to a mathematical singularity.
I'm not entirely opposed to the article's characterization, but this is a big one to get wrong. What the term has become in its pseudo-cult modern context is entirely divorced from what it came out of.
The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events to a specific point in the future that will lead to some very religious sounding results:
* Eternal life
* A powerful entity or entities who will fix whatever is wrong
- An end to poverty
- An end to disease
* Personal Freedom
This is entirely a faith based belief that can not be proven or disproven. It is by no means certain that you can extrapolate to a singularity in our future. Nor is it certain that you can assume it will have the claimed effects. While the term singularity in math and physics has a well defined term with clear non-religious meanings. "The Singularity" is entirely a faith based religious belief.
I'm not sure where you get that version of The Singularity? Wikipedia has the most popular version of the technological singularity is AI making better AI leading to an intelligence explosion which may or may not happen but is not especially faith based or religious. (I think we'll have AI making better AI but more of a gradual ramp up than an explosion).
> The Singularity is a belief that you can extrapolate from history and current events
That's exactly backwards; a singularity is a point past which you can't extrapolate, because trying to do so leads to absurdities (e.g. infinite densities, time as a spacial dimension, one egg costing more than the GDP of Europe, etc.) "The Singularity" was called specifically that because it was the point at which historical projections would become absurd, and thus we could not meaningfully forecast past it (like an event horizon).
Some people ran with that and decided that it was a forecast that specific absurdities would certainly happen, but that's mostly just a reading comprehension issue.
I think the idea is that you can extrapolate that a singularity will occur and when it’s likely to happen. It’s what happens next that you can’t predict.
The singularity in this context refers to the point beyond which predictions will fail because we cannot possibly foresee the consequences of certain technological changes.
There's nothing historical about it; it came about as a result of a few different science writers looking into the future and wondering how we keep up in an accelerating technological context.
I actually agree that it's become something else, but the origin of the term was what I was correcting, and its origin isn't something woo-woo, it's firmly based in scientific speculation.
Unfortunately as someone of the christian faith I have first hand experience that you can not control someone else's use of language. Whether that is the meaning it was originally intended to convey or not that is the meaning that it conveys now. The best you can do here is to say: "That does not represent my own personal definition despite the zeitgeist coopting it to mean something else".
Even in its original context, it's still a bunch of woo-woo. The core idea, that creating a technology that can improve technology will lead to exponential technological advancement that can be modeled as a mathematical singularity, is very hand-wavy and silly on its face.
It's been very easy to observe acceleration in progress over time, and there's a natural question that emerges: Will we reach a point where people can't keep up?
Nothing hand-wavy or silly there. And the discussion of the topic as it was formed in the second half of the 20th century was pretty carefully couched in terms of what-ifs and conservative projection.
I don't know; there was definitely an apocalyptic quality to the Singularity in Marooned In Real Time, and superintelligences in A Fire Upon the Deep were literally referred to as Gods (there's a brief reference to Applied Theology in there, IIRC.) So you could argue that there was at least an unconscious parallel to religion in the way Vernor Vinge saw the Singularity.
There's a lot of speculation in there, but it's pretty carefully couched in scientific terms, and particularly in what-ifs that satisfy even the most stringent demands for conservative thinking.
That's hardly an unconscious parallel. That's a direct, atheist take.
The whole attempt at casting transhumanism as religion is silly. Transhumanist side says, "there's no supernatural God, but sufficiently advanced technology could approximate it" - and then people turn around and say, "you see, you say enough technology is like a god, therefore you're religious and believe in God (specifically in Christian God per mainstream religion, with all its mores)".
Religion and theism are orthogonal concepts. You can be an atheist and religious at the same time - many Buddhist sects are entirely atheistic, for example. Many cults are also atheistic.
A good example of atheistic, even materialistic, religion was the official doctrine of the USSR, "marxist dialectical materialism". This had all of the hallmarks of a religion, complete with religious texts, priests, condemnation of non-believers, and so on - but caked in fully materialistic and dogmatically atheist concepts.
In this sense, free market maximalism is a materialistic religion of its own.
Still, this is not the framing that people calling transhumanism a religion use. The arguments are usually trying to show parallels between transhumanist beliefs/theories and theistic religious beliefs (almost always Christianity) - specifically to say, "look, it sounds like Christianity if you substitute AI for God and Singularity for Rapture, therefore this is just rebranded Christianity, not Science", therefore implying the transhumanists are wrong. The argument is, literally, "this pattern-matches to religion therefore must be just as wrong", and I'm saying it's a dumb argument.
You could put it anywhere you like; our ability to forecast the future has been rubbish for thousands of years. Some of my favorites: 2019, 2000, 1992, 1969, 1928, 1900, mid 1700s, ~400 BCE, ~5000 BP, ~11000 BPE.
This is why I tend to phrase it as an "event horizon" rather than a "singularity" (well, this and to avoid the baggage).
There's always been some stuff we can't forecast, and some other stuff we can forecast kinda OK-ish. If you'd asked people from 11000 BPE if the sun would still be rising and crops would still be grown today, I suspect the biggest difficulty would be finding someone who really understood the meaning of the number used to express the number of years between then and now — even a "big city" back then would have been order of 1k-2k people.
But I say "sun" and "crops" because of what I expect to be the limits of their imagination. We see such limits even today — even on Hacker News, look at threads about AI taking over the world, and you will see people discussing AI as if it can only be in the form of existing current LLMs.
So, the question to ask is: how far into the future would you have to take someone from each of those years, before they're shocked by what they encounter? That's my "event horizon", because it's the horizon beyond which you cannot see, even if that horizon is one of inability to predict what specific thing will be invented rather than the general trend-lines going infinite.
The time-gap to a shocking new invention decreases as the rate of progress increases.
Obviously how much some person will be able to forecast and hence not be surprised by, will depend on how much attention they pay to technological developments — and I've seen software developers surprised by Google Translate having an AR mode a decade after the tech was first demonstrated — but there is an upper limit even for people who obsessively consume all public information about a topic: if you're reading about it when you go to sleep, will you be surprised when you wake up by all the overnight developments?
Personally, I've tried making my own forecasts about the future, I'm fairly consistent for the last decade that my models stop making sense around 2032. But even with that consistency, I could only see ChatGPT coming when InstructGPT was shown off in a Two Minute Papers video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=PmxhCyhevMY&t=4m...) and the rate of change of Transformer and Diffusion models has continued to surprise me.
(I also didn't predict how severely YouTube would be stuffed with adverts, but that's more of a cultural shift — everyone gets all "kids these days" as they get older, why would I be any different?)
I agree. I believe in all those things, but in a sense that they seem inevitable, not as something I’m rooting for.
The singularity, distilled, is that if/when we get AGI or other world-changing technology, accurately predicting what happens next is impossible. As the rate of technology advance increases, the interval over which you can make reasonable predictions shortens until eventually what happens tomorrow is a role of the dice.
I believe in aliens in the same way: the universe is huge so I think they must exist because (small likelihood) x (huge number of chances) seems inevitable. I don’t think they’re flying over Idaho to terrorize farmers, though.
Were you trying to make short games or offer some kind of abridging service?
Because I've wondered about that too. Like, right now there's a pretty big dichotomy between "purchase and play a game myself" and "watch someone else play it on youtube/twitch". But it would be interesting if there was a market for a kind of interactive guided tour, like for $10 let me play the best 4-6 hours of AC:Odyssey, and that's delivered as a mod that just trims all the fat, levels me up quickly enough to hustle through the main story beats and see the good boss encounters and action set pieces.
(Ubisoft themselves sort of do this with their paid XP boosters, but that doesn't actually cut content, it just lets you skip a few hours of grinding over what is otherwise still a 40hr+ experience for most people)
Perhaps I'm an outlier. I expect to pay for my personal gaming experience. But if there's some necessary part of gameplay I don't like, that's negative experience that makes the game worse for me, reducing the value of the game to me. To skip that gameplay seems like something that shouldn't cost me anything, or even get me a discount because I'm not getting some of the experience I paid for. Like say if a side dish is so bad I send it back at a restaurant. I neither expect to pay for that nor a premium for someone else to eat it for me!
So I'm not willing to pay a premium for such a thing. I don't see why the game with the bad part missing should be worth more than with the bad part present. Rather, the inverse! I'll more likely skip the game entirely and find a different one that doesn't have such mandatory grinding.
As I say maybe that's an outlying opinion since making money from this kind of thing apparently works. It it helps, I'm in the adult with family demographic and my time (rather than game purchase levels of money) is what is at a premium.
I've never bought an XP booster myself, and I feel some of the same conflict. Although I can obviously afford it, I don't think I could stomach doing this for new releases. So at most it would be something where I'd be interested after 2-3 years when all the patches are in, bugs are fixed, and review consensus has settled.
So rather than pay US$70 today for a buggy, grindy new release experience, I pay $20 in two years for the base game + $10 for the "player's digest" mod.
I expect even then it would be a tough sell, particularly having to be on PC— a lot of the market for this kind of thing would more casual console/mobile/streaming players.
I love this idea; I can no longer justify 40-100 hour playthroughs. Lots of people rave about Elden Ring but the time investment is just really offputting. I'd buy a version of it at half the price and one quarter of the playtime.
That said, I'd imagine a fair chunk of the impact of major set pieces and end bosses is that you've spent many hours to get to that point. An abridged version would have to leave bough in to allow emotional investment in the story. This is still possible.
Gamers Digest? (For those of you who remember Reader's Digest).
I was making short games. Specifically I was trying to make games that packed the same density of concentrated entertainment as other media.
The abridgement thing sounds like a smart approach, but ultimately I've gotten more enjoyment from shorter games that don't pack the fat in to begin with.
There are visualization techniques that help with the washing over, but there's also the advice, which CBT therapists do give but randos on the internet always forget, that sometimes you're having anxiety (or another "negative emotion") for a reason, and it's a bad idea to ignore it in those cases.
If you want to get better at the "washing over" thing, maybe try visualizations like:
- As you breathe, imagine you're pulling over to the side of the road and watching your anxious thoughts drive past.
- As you breathe, imagine taking each anxious thought and placing it on a leaf on a stream and watching it float away
But in general, security theatre is kind of a legit reason to feel anxious - these folks have real power over you and can screw up your life - so it's ok to just feel it in those situations.
You sound like you've never had an issue, and hey, congrats, but let's not pretend that there aren't plenty of horror stories and legitimate reasons to worry. And suppressing legitimate worry is a bad habit, particularly for folks who don't have white, male, and several other "default" identity markers in their profile.
I got plenty. My luggage got lost more than I can count. Missed connecting flights due to delays. Had a flight take of with four hour of delay to then ingest a bird in the engine on climbout so we had to land back imediately with a smoke filled cabin. Got selected for extra screening plenty of times, had been asked to go to the security office to answer extra questions about my luggage. Had my share of flight cancelations too. The most serious issue was perhaps when I got waylaid for a few weeks because an airline didn’t like the stamps on my imigration paperwork. According to my imigration lawyer the airline was in the wrong and misunderstanding the law, but what can you do? We got it sorted with the embassy as soon as we could and I was on my way.
Thing is that worrying would not have helped with any of these. Simply not the right answer.
But it's a comparatively huge pain in the ass to use a lot of government services where I live without a smartphone.