Thanks for the links. They seem to mostly be saying: the "pay off" for being the swing vote is gigantic, changing everyone's life, so even though the chance of being that vote is infinitesimal it's rational to go for the tiny chance of making a huge difference.

I'm sure this is valid reasoning, but it's disappointing to me if this is the whole story. It's like voting as lottery, that your vote essentially never matters except when it has this giant impact.

I think there is mapping problem here as well. Just as you can't map your vote onto one of the excess votes in a normal election, you can't map your vote onto that one winning vote in a close election. In each case it's a game of probabilities and fractional contributions only. But I can't sort it all out.

I think that your vote can count even if, in retrospect, it changed nothing, so long as votes are interchangeable and anonymous.

I think that's the crux of the issue. My take was to assign a mapping between people and votes such that your vote was in the "excess" portion and thus didn't matter. But just because such a mapping exists doesn't mean it is fair or valid to assign it. Instead I imagine it's a statistics problem where all mappings are possible, which leaves you with a non-zero but tiny "contribution" to electing the winner.

And if you voted for the loser? Then I think the contribution to voter turnout mentioned in the post comes into play. Again a only very tiny amount, but non-zero.

Then finally social issues likes signaling status and desire to belong to a group probably are pretty big factors, maybe bigger than the above "real" factors.

In the end I think it's possible to justify voting or not voting depending on your values, particularly how you value your time relative to these fuzzier benefits.

In a typical election with a greater-than-one vote differential, it doesn't seem like your vote matters at all to the outcome. In the specific sense that if you had not voted, the outcome would have been identical. So I guess that is something to resolve, do you deserve fractional "credit" for the win, even if the win differential was by millions of votes?

I think you are right that good feelings and status are a big part of it. Why do people endure all manor of inconvenience to be a part of any big event, a movie opening or concert or rally? A lot of bragging rights to have been a part of something, rather than just watched it on TV.

Still I wonder if that is the whole explanation. The system needs X% of voters out there to be viable, but it has no real carrot to attract people to vote. So then voters just assign a value to voting, and show up in relatively large numbers on their own. And it all works out? It's a very clever arrangement if that's how it works.

In my post I suggested there are two separate motivations for voting:

1) Picking the winner. Essentially no one does this in big elections, but yes there is that tiny chance. I didn't go into this motivation. Thinking about it now I suspect using a lottery-like mentality a lot of people do vote for this reason: they just might be the one.

2) Adding to voter turnout, thus making the election legitimate. Everyone who votes does this, but it's only by a tiny amount. This I would equate to "not littering" in that you are unambiguously helping but only incrementally. This I think is in fact the stronger reason for voting, but still your contribution is very tiny.

In the end I'm down to "civic duty" and "it's the right thing to do" and stuff like that as far as the best reason to vote. Maybe the lesson is it's good large chunk of people are NOT rational, because I do maintain as turnout goes down, the results get worse, as far as what people "really" want.

Now I didn't mention social pressure either. There was a swiss study where voter turnout didn't go up when vote-by-mail was made an option. The supposition being people no longer felt the pressure to make an appearance at the polls to be a good citizen, they could just surreptitiously not vote in the privacy of their own home.

http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/abs/10.1162/jeea_a_00015?journalCode=jeea

You are right, it was an exaggeration to say you can swap Singularity with Future everywhere. But it's an exaggeration born out of a truth. Many things said about The Singularity are simply things we could say about the future. They are true today but will be true again in 2045 or 2095 or any year.

This comes back to the root post and the perfectly smooth nature of the exponential. While smoothness implies there is nothing special brewing in 30 years, it also implies 30 years from now things will look remarkably like today. We will be staring at an upcoming billion-fold improvement in computer capacity and marveling over how it will change everything. Which it will.

Kruzweil says The Singularity is just "an event which is hard to see beyond". I submit every 30 year chunk of time is "hard to see beyond". It's long enough time that things will change dramatically. That has always been true and always will be.

Actually by "different levels of intelligence" I meant your point that humans themselves have very different levels of intelligence, one from the other. That "human-level AI" is a very broad target, not a narrow one.

I've never seen it discussed does an AI require more computation to think about quantum physics than to think about what order to pick up items in the grocery store? How about training time? Is it a little more or orders of magnitude more? I don't think it is known.

I'm starting to believe term The Singularity can be replaced with The Future without any loss. Here is something from The Singularity Institute with the substitution made:

But the real heart of the The Future is the idea of better intelligence or smarter minds. Humans are not just bigger chimps; we are better chimps. This is the hardest part of the The Future to discuss – it's easy to look at a neuron and a transistor and say that one is slow and one is fast, but the mind is harder to understand. Sometimes discussion of the The Future tends to focus on faster brains or bigger brains because brains are relatively easy to argue about compared to minds; easier to visualize and easier to describe.

from http://singinst.org/overview/whatisthesingularity

Wow good stuff. Especially liked yours not linked above:

http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/

I called the bluff on the exponential itself, but I was willing to believe that crossing the brain-equivalent threshold and the rise of machine intelligence could produce some kind of sudden acceleration or event. I felt The Singularity wasn't going to happen because of exponential growth itself, but might still happen because of where exponential growth takes us.

But you make a very good case that the whole thing is bunk. I especially like the "different levels of intelligence" point, had not heard that before re: AI.

But I find it still tempting though to say there is just something special about machines that can design other machines. That like pointing a camcorder at a TV screen it leads to some kind of instant recursion. But maybe it is similar, a neat trick but not something which changes everything all of a sudden.

I wonder if someone 50 years ago said "some day computers will display high quality video and everyone will watch computers instead of TV or film". Sure it is happening, but it's a rather long slow transition which in fact might never 100% complete. Maybe AI is more like that.