the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:05:30 GMT

raphael@mastodon.sdf.org — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 06:05:30 GMT

@glyph I think the closest worry I can see is more a logistical collapse due to semiautomation causing massive planning issues

A real life equivalent to “ah why are my servers all falling over…. Oh disk space” but for some planning processes all optimizing on some weird axis.

Not a singularity so much as just a bunch of pain from us shifting more and more into automated decision making and having less eyeballs on intermediate results. Still… humans will be in the loop in so many spots!

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:51:23 GMT

f4grx@chaos.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:51:23 GMT

@glyph that and also they're all slop machines that generates shit in the first place even when begged not to screw up

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:48:37 GMT

brouhaha@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:48:37 GMT

@glyph
People also forget that the definition of singularity was simply a point beyond which we have no hope of making any accurate predictions.
Reaching the singularity didn't necessarily mean that we would suddenly get AGI or extropian uploading or any of the myriad other things other science fiction authors layered on it or ascribed to it.
That original definition might still apply to a sigmoid, but obviously it's much less certain.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:37:46 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:37:46 GMT

@darkuncle very kind of you to say so, thanks

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:33:11 GMT

darkuncle@infosec.exchange — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:33:11 GMT

@mcc @glyph agree all along but also highly recommend “The Exponential Age” as a good read. Part of the problem with exponential growth is our tendency to assume it will continue.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:31:49 GMT

darkuncle@infosec.exchange — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:31:49 GMT

@glyph reading this thread was a great cap to my evening, thanks

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:29:42 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:29:42 GMT

@pkraus there are lots of very scary things happening right now, it's just that "swarms of killer robots with minds beyond our comprehension" are not among them

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:24:56 GMT

pkraus@berlin.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:24:56 GMT

@glyph yes, but to destroy is so much easier than to create. I worry that some moron might put spicy autocorrect in charge of a hydro dam or one of those shooty tooties the US has all over Europe. It wouldn't take much for Musk to (accidentally on purpose) Heinlein us all with Starlink.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:22:07 GMT

darkuncle@infosec.exchange — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:22:07 GMT

@glyph it’s like saying that the Parker solar probe being the fastest thing ever produced by humanity, at nearly 500,000 mph, is a material step towards relativistic travel.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:11:41 GMT

mcc@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:11:41 GMT

@glyph this is how you turn a post-scarcity society into … … whatever it is we're doing now

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:09:52 GMT

mcc@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:09:52 GMT

@glyph however i *am* scared of the economic system that would bother to do that

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:08:50 GMT

r343l@freeradical.zone — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:08:50 GMT

@glyph With literally not even one minuscule step in the process dependent on a human doing things at human speed via flesh and blood movement. Because if any of those processes could be made to work without a human doing something physical, why wouldn’t the people with money have done that already??

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:06:03 GMT

miss_rodent@girlcock.club — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:06:03 GMT

@glyph so much energy, and so many articles, are going into the scifi-fanfiction doom that it's seemingly crowding out the actual, tangible, presently-addressable, immanent problems, that have fuck-all to do with chatbot pseudogods, and everything to do with the people building them.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:03:31 GMT

miss_rodent@girlcock.club — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:03:31 GMT

@glyph Meanwhile, the actual potential (but mitigatable) doom - the methane generators poisoning the air and worsening the severity and frequency of climate disasters, the technofascists spending obscene amounts of money undermining governments and trying to radicalize large parts of the population, while burning resources at a rate only a captain planet villain could find reasonable, etc. - goes largely unremarkedupon -_-;

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:03:03 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 05:03:03 GMT

casual thinkpieces and lazy attempts at scicomm are what has set me off but the actual thing I'm mad about is that we are ruled by people with a child's understanding of the world and the economy and that's actually really bad

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:56:25 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:56:25 GMT

seriously just imagine the plot of one of the movies that doomers seem to think are documentaries, like Terminator 2. imagine the scene where the T-1000 is getting pelted with bullets. instead of seamlessly autonomously healing, imagine it has to lie down and wait for a human to place an order for $1,000,000 of NVIDIA GPUs to be delivered in a shipping container and then a construction crew to set up a methane generator to run for two weeks straight before it got up again. is that still scary?

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:51:37 GMT

dpnash@c.im — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:51:37 GMT

@glyph Or any other subject, really.

Even in STEM.

Like the introductory biology class I took with its toy population models that went sigmoid very quickly, simply because biologists understand that populations of living things hit barriers to growth. Or the control systems engineering class I took, where we figured out how to tell which parts of the system behavior would be good over the long term, which (to oversimplify only slightly) meant *no positive exponentials* anywhere in the math.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:49:45 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:49:45 GMT

like if anyone had halfway-plausible "grey goo" nanotech that could do anything that looked like computation, that might be worrying. a locally viable self-reproducing platform that can make another one of itself from a pile of dirt, even if it's like, special dirt, that might scare me a little bit. but an overlord hive-mind that requires an uninterrupted global high-purity helium supply chain just to make ONE more of itself is supposed to be a threat?

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:49:12 GMT

miss_rodent@girlcock.club — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:49:12 GMT

@glyph Ants are self-sustaining, self-reproducing, more intelligent than any AI humans have managed to make, and capable of directly altering the physical world.
If 'self-sustaining' were really the break-point, humans lost well before we existed as a species.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:47:34 GMT

petrillic@hachyderm.io — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:47:34 GMT

@glyph i would pay for that.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:44:56 GMT

xgranade@wandering.shop — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:44:56 GMT

@glyph That would be such an incredible improvement over their current coverage *and* I would pay to see that. Both things can be true.

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:42:36 GMT

reedmideke@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:42:36 GMT

@glyph Maybe the real singularity was the ~~friends we made along the way~~ black hole we dumped all our cash into

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:41:58 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:41:58 GMT

@suetanvil it's ruining my ability to appreciate the fantasy!!!

Reply to the idea that a "singularity" is possible is just the idea that you can turn "mistaking a sigmoid for an exponential" into a millenarian religion on Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:41:45 GMT

glyph@mastodon.social — Sat, 11 Apr 2026 04:41:45 GMT

@suetanvil WHY CAN OUR GENERATION'S SUPPOSEDLY GREATEST MINDS NOT DISTINGUISH BETWEEN REALITY AND FANTASY