标签：#singularity

My favorite metaphor for brutal cognitive dissonance — the one we will likely experience when the Singularity actually arrives — is “ the knight in the supermarket .” I prefer the word “chevalier,” though, so I’ll be using that going forward. Try to imagine the following scene: a medieval chevalier, somewhere on the land of current Germany, riding his horse, heavily armored, helmet on, big sword. The year is 1450, and our chevalier is just charging in a small battle against some equally armed neighbors. But then something happens. A short circuit in the space-time continuum and our chevalier is fast forwarded to the current times, but in the exact same location. Where, of course, there is a supermarket now. The lights. The shiny shelves with thousands of small, colored objects. The cold near the meat sector. The TVs rotating ads with faces of women talking in a slightly similar language, but saying words he cannot understand. At this moment, it’s safe to say that our chevalier is completely lost. He has no idea how light is made (no “electricity” concept in his mind), no way to know how cold is made inside a building (no “refrigerator”), no way to understand what the tiny packages on the shelves are (“chemistry” is closer to alchemy for him) and no way to understand remote communication (“television” doesn’t simply exist). He can still walk around, but the world will feel almost hostile to him. We’re Not in the Singularity. Not Yet Now let’s get back to the current X timeline, where everybody is screaming that we’re in AGI. In the Singularity. The world will never be the same. This changes everything. But does it, really? Are we experiencing the same cognitive gap as our chevalier in the supermarket? I don’t think so. The world is keep worlding right now, except for a very small percentage of people who are subjecting themselves to some AI-related psychosis. All we’ve done so far is cramming a LOT of compute into tiny digital artifacts that are nothing more than ver