San Francisco Nomad

I just ran across this essay by Ran Prieur talking about all the flaws in the religious-like assumptions of the “Singularity is Near” crowd.  These people make all kinds of assumptions based on some kind of crazy faith, rather than on any actual evidence. See The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines.

How did I miss this essay? Brilliant and insightful in comparison to some rant about how we’ll all become transhuman and some deus ex machina event will save us from all of our screwed up ineptitude and hubris.

I tend to think Ray Bradbury was much closer to correct about “progress” when he wrote The Martian Chronicles than people like Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil when they rant about the hypothetical singularity as some kind of inevitable, wonderful, rapture-like event.  And even if it’s an inevitable event, what kind of progress does it turn out to be when the singularity starts bringing us smallpox infected blankets, or starts controlling us for it’s own ends, or simply has some kind of value system that we’ve never conceived of before?  Is smarter always better? Is faster always better?  Would you rather hang out with a genius psychopath or a nice person with an IQ of 90?

I’m dismayed at the differences that cultural exposure and expectations make in a kid’s future.  Let me elaborate.

I was on the 38 Geary bus in San Francisco a few weeks back and overheard some urban, basketball-playing kids talking about their friends on the team who were looking at college scholarships.  The gist of the conversation was that someone had screwed up their game and was only getting into a California State college somewhere.

When asked why this guy wasn’t going to UCLA by one of the younger kids, the more knowledgeable kid explained that UCLA was almost as hard to get in to as Berkeley.  When the younger kid asked why they were hard to get in to, the older one couldn’t give any reasons.

That lead to another story about a school called “Menlo” that one kid had seen while at a basketball tournament and how there was some big school.  He really couldn’t come up with what it was called.  There was also another story about how their coach wouldn’t let them wander far from the  dorm they were staying at (seemingly so as not to alarm rich locals).

A few things amazed me. One kid lived less than 50 miles from Stanford and didn’t know the name of the school, while apparently the rest of the kids had no idea it even existed.  These were kids who seemed to be hoping to be college bound (on a basketball scholarships presumably).  They knew extremely little about the schools from their peers, their parents, the news, no one?  They’re basing their future on this?  Not even a little input or planning by parents or anyone else?  Meanwhile their chances of making a good living off basketball are only slightly higher than winning the lottery, so where does that leave them?

The point of the story isn’t that these kids are dumb, because they didn’t seem like it to me.  They seemed like inquisitive, mostly good-natured kids who had never gotten the same basic information that most suburban kids would’ve gotten from their parents, school and their environment.   It makes me nervous to think of them charging blindly into their future without being prepared in the slightest.  I wonder how it will all work out for them?