11–20 of 607 posts
This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. Th…
Maybe not, but there are definitely very physical laws governing everything else, that a superintelligent being's ambitions would run into.
A superintelligent being isn't going to be able to build a superliminal reactionless drive if the laws of the universe say it isn't possible.
More relevant, a superintelligent being isn't going to be able to enslave us all with robots if the laws of chemistry don't permit a quantum leap in battery chemistry.
I did read the article through, but made up my mind that the author is presenting a flawed argument when I saw how quickly he skimmed through his base premises, not really giving them much in terms of fair thought. In particular, I don't see how he can so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain structure. I feel there's some degree of arrogance there, as we have not yet even begun to un…
I did read the article through, but made up my mind that the author is presenting a flawed argument when I saw how quickly he skimmed through his base premises, not really giving them much in terms of fair thought. In particular, I don't see how he can so blithely assume so easily that there is no quantum effect in the brain structure. I feel there's some degree of arrogance there, as we have not yet even begun to un…
Read it more carefully, because that's not what he did. He is saying "The AI riskers claim 'If you accept X, then you must accept Y'", where X is "the brain does not use quantum effects" and Y is "AI apocalypse". He does not himself take a position on X, but argues against the X=>Y implication.
And it's not really relevant, but for what it's worth, the majority consensus among neuroscientists is that the brain does not use quantum mechanical effects and can be modeled using classical physics alone. Roger Penrose is in the minority on this question.
I think brains very probably use quantum effects in ways we might not even be able to study with anything close to today's technology. As a result, individual neurons or groups of neurons can be way more complicated than we are expecting them to be. I'd say we're at least 2 major revolutions away from even coming close to what a chimpanzee's intellect, much less a human's.
Maybe that's the case, but this sounds like it goes against Occam's razor, and give a lot of extra credit to the chaotic process of evolution that it was meaningfully able to harness these quantum effects.
This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. Th…
Er, that wasn't inventing theories about time travel , just about time.
I think brains very probably use quantum effects in ways we might not even be able to study with anything close to today's technology. As a result, individual neurons or groups of neurons can be way more complicated than we are expecting them to be. I'd say we're at least 2 major revolutions away from even coming close to what a chimpanzee's intellect, much less a human's.
As a shorthand "quantum effects" are often hand-waved as crazy powerful "weird" things, but we can certainly model them and they really aren't as "magic" as a lot of popular science would have one believe (as much as even some of us otherwise rational people so strongly wish to believe in quantum magic).
'In particular, there's no physical law that puts a cap on intelligence at the level of human beings.' Maybe not, but there are definitely very physical laws governing everything else, that a superintelligent being's ambitions would run into. A superintelligent being isn't going to be able to build a superliminal reactionless drive if the laws of the universe say it isn't possible. More relevant, a superintelligent b…
I think brains very probably use quantum effects in ways we might not even be able to study with anything close to today's technology. As a result, individual neurons or groups of neurons can be way more complicated than we are expecting them to be. I'd say we're at least 2 major revolutions away from even coming close to what a chimpanzee's intellect, much less a human's.
I think you have to be a bit more specific to claim something particularly special.
I think it's much more likely the important difference is that brains are built in 3D allowing far far more connectivity than wiring in ~5 layers of metal between 2D transistors in the same plane does - it's that added complexity we don't have the technology to reproduce (yet) that's the issue
This article explicitly endorses argument ad hominem: "These people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way. Even though their arguments are irrefutable, everything in your experience tells you you're dealing with a cult. Of course, they have a brilliant argument for why you should ignore those instincts, but that's the inside view talking. Th…
Uh ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_special_relativity#...