"I live in California, which has the highest poverty rate in the United States, even though it's home to Silicon Valley. I see my rich industry doing nothing to improve the lives of everyday people and indigent people around us." This is trivially false. Over a hundred billionaires have now pledged to donate the majority of their wealth, and the list includes many tech people like Bill Gates, Larry Ellison, Mark Zuck…
The issue is the concentration of the wealth itself, not what those who benefit from the concentration of wealth choose to do with it.
I've always wondered if the problems an intelligence solves are exponentially hard so even if we build a super intelligence it wouldn't be all that much smarter than we are. For example compare how many more cities in the traveling salesman problem a super computer can solve vs your grandmas pc. It's more but surprisingly not all that many more. What do you think of that idea?
I think this basic concept of intractability, which programmers are very familiar with, hasn't penetrated far enough into AI world.
Bostrom and Yudkowsky in particular seem happy to hand-wave past computational complexity.
"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept." The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe…
Any recommendations on decent pop-sci books that explore the latest understanding of the origin and mechanism of consciousness? Is anyone exploring this third way at all?
I read theory-of-mind pop sci constantly, I'd say Penrose has the vitalist perspective and Kurzweil has the physicalist perspective. Hofstadter is a lovely read too (physicalist).
"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept." The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe…
Well, if you believe that despite having no evidence of something unexplained by physics happening in the brain, it's still a religious myth, it doesn't matter the name you give it.
And if you have any piece of evidence, you can be sure the people at the nearest physics dept will love to hear it.
"Put another way, this is the premise that the mind arises out of ordinary physics... If you are very religious, you might believe that a brain is not possible without a soul. But for most of us, this is an easy premise to accept." The thing that irks me about this is how it reinforces a common (and in my opinion, false) dichotomy: either you believe the mind is explicable in terms of ordinary physics or you believe…
One thing I rarely see discussed is the possibility that the brain is just too complex to practically reproduce. That is to say, that it is technically possible, but not practical. Evolution had billions of years, working in a massively parallel way to work this out after all. It's possible that the brain is a huge tangled mess of rules and special cases that we will never be able to fully understand and reproduce. Also, even if we are able to produce a basic intelligence, why do we assume it will ever get to the point where it can understand itself well enough to self improve? It's possible there is a threshold we won't be able to get past for self improvement to be possible.
> I can't point to the part of my brain that is "good at neurosurgery", operate on it, and by repeating the procedure make myself the greatest neurosurgeon that has ever lived. Ben Carson tried that, and look what happened to him.
'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…
All matter is, in principle, a battery. There are no physical laws that prevent near limitless energy storage.
"The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation." This isn't just an unreflective assumption. The argument is laid out in much more detail in "The Basic AI Drives" (Omohundro 2008, https://selfawaresystems.files.wordpress.com/2008/01/ai_driv... ), which is expanded o…
Certainly the assumption that every intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve is unwarranted. But it only takes one intelligent agent that wants to self-improve for the scary thing to happen.
I wonder if an AI would favor a recursive or genetic approach? If it's the latter then an AI could see value in death.
It's amusing how his talk and Stuart Russel's talk [0] -- which end up going opposing ways -- use the "atomic bomb" as an example in fallacious thinking. Stuart's example is about how respected physicists said "impossible to get energy out of atoms" and the very next morning someone published a paper stating how to do it.