The usually reliable Michael Anissimov has claimed that I seem to think that “superintelligence will automatically acquire a favorable morality without any real work.” Now I’m not all that sensitive about such things; but it bothers me that SIAI, of all people, should fail to understand the basic parameters of the problem, and thus have… Continue reading Superhuman Psychopaths
cute video from nokia about what a nanotech phone might be like…
Previous in series: Why would I not want a flying car? How close to a true VTOL does a flying car have to be to retain the advantages we would like? If you have to keep it at an airport, you have to drive there and back in a separate vehicle, obviating many of the… Continue reading VTOL
Previous in series: Why would I want a flying car? There have been many reasons urged against the concept of flying cars; let’s take stock of them here: They are impractical (and thus time spent on the concept is wasted) They would be noisy or unsightly They would be dangerous, to the occupants or to… Continue reading Why would I not want a flying car?
Previous in series: Where is my flying car? Let’s consider: I live in Laporte, PA, and have an office in the Foresight suite in Menlo Park, CA. That’s a distance of about 2800 miles, and I could drive it in about 40 hours, a full working week. That’s a substantial commute. Of course, I don’t… Continue reading Why would I want a flying car?
Nanodot appears to be back on the air again. Our outage was an aftereffect of the hack attack we had a few weeks ago. This, and the other lingering effect (de-listing of the main site from Google) are both not actual results of the hacking (which put code in that popped up ad windows) but… Continue reading Back again
There’s a nice article over at the Singularity Hub that’s a round-up of currently-available haptics devices. They seem primarily excited over the prospects of haptics in gaming, but there are two reasons we’re interested in developments. First is simply telerobotics, as in Feynman Path manipulation. We want the feedback to help develop an intuitive feel… Continue reading Haptics
While we’re on the subject of machine morality, here’s a talk I gave a couple of years ago on the subject. You can see Wendell Wallach, one of the authors of Moral Machines, ask a question at about minute 27. Ethics for Machines
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Annisimov has a pointer to a review of Moral Machines by Wallach and Allen. He makes one major factual mistake, though: MM is not the “first published book exclusively focused on Friendly AI” as he calls it. The first book dealing exclusively with these issues was my Beyond AI, which… Continue reading First machine ethics book
A short comment on Drexler’s paper Biological and Nanomechanical Systems: Contrasts in Evolutionary Capacity: He distinguishes two types of design, O-style (like organic) and M-style (like mechanical) systems. He points out that O-style systems are much more robust to incremental design modification, where M-style systems require coordinated changes that are much, much less likely to happen… Continue reading Organic vs machine evolution
