A High-Tech Gambler’s Fallacy
Two weeks ago I went to Las Vegas and had a first hand experience with the ability of random phenomena to produce trends. I lost $1250, most of it on Baccarat. Probably 9 out of 10 hands went for the player while I bet on the banker. As I gambled I couldn’t help but think that things were going to turn my way soon. I was due after all.
Of course, previous wagers have no influence on future wagers. The belief that they do is called the Gambler’s Fallacy and the casinos make a lot of money off of it. Consider the picture below which I took while at The Venetian. The display shows the last few numbers that hit on the Roulette wheel. Although the color doesn’t show up well, the display shows that seven reds hit in a row prior to black 17 hitting. Prior to 17, someone might think that the table is ‘hot’ for Red and would put a bet down. The casino wants us to think this because they know it makes us more likely to gamble even though one spin has no influence on another. 
The Singularity is basically a High-Tech Gambler’s Fallacy because Transhumanists think that previous performance predicts future results. Since we have evolved higher intelligence on our planet, it must have been inevitable not just lucky. Transhumanists are, in a sense, betting their life savings that this lucky streak will continue. They are sacrificing their brief lives and obsessing about an utterly imaginary future. Or as Matthew Arnold put it in his poem The Hymn of Empedocles:
[They] feign a bliss
Of doubtful future date,
And while we dream on this
Lose all our present state,
And relegate to worlds yet distant our repose?
Again, most transhumanists do not believe intelligence was inevitable, or that our future is guaranteed at all. The World Transhumanist Association's founder, Nick Bostrom, wrote the paper "Existential Risk", which goes into great detail about disasters that could wipe out our species or permanently curtail its potential.
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I think I see some problems with your argument.
I'm not clear on what transhumanist argument you think is making use of the Gambler's Fallacy. Is it the Vingean argument that intelligence after a certain point can be applied to the task of improving itself, and so such an intelligence could become increasingly more intelligent to the point where we could no longer begin to sensibly predict what would happen (the point at which sensible predictions stop being dubbed the Singularity)? If it is, I don't think your argument is particularly valid. The Gambler's Fallacy is believing there to be correlations that aren't there, that believing independent flips of a coin are in fact dependent, right? But a Singularity situation of an intelligence developing breakthroughs to make itself more intelligent - well, research builds on previous research, and so hardly sounds like independent flips of a coin. It wasn't a flip of a coin which decided we got Einsteinian physics *after* Newtonian physics, for example.
If it's directed against the more Kurzweilian argument that human technology is going to get better and better and that the rate at which it is getting better is only going to itself get better until it all explodes into some Vingean Singularity - then I'm a little more sympathetic (because of the S-curves that seem to fit better and what looks to me like a general slowdown in innovation these days), but not very. Research still builds on research, after all. It was hardly an independent coin flip that this year's computer processors are faster than those from years past. A gambler that bet that computing would be faster every year would have won those bets, and enough bets that if it were merely a Gambler's Fallacy to believe in a 'hot' computer field that the luck of that gambler would be quite astronomical...
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Gamblering is a drug
i know itblueoo.com
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Gambling is gambling, no more no less.
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Interesting review you have here. I am an unexperimented gambler, only been in a casino three times but I liked each experience. I know casinos have specific ways to attract customers and enable them to play, in the end it's our choice that matters. If you have a clear head you'll never be sorry you spent time and money in a casino.
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A gambler that bet that computing would be faster every year would have won those bets, and enough bets that if it were merely a Gambler's Fallacy to believe in a 'hot' computer field that the luck of that gambler would be quite astronomical ...
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