The Singularity Summit is going on in NYC this weekend. This will be an open thread for comments or questions about the talks (or any related subject.)
There are those who worry about AIs or robots taking over the world. Isaac Asimov famously worried about people worrying about it — what he called the Frankenstein Complex — and invented the Three Laws of Robotics to show, at a sort of literary level of understanding, that we could build machines that were safe… Continue reading Building Safe AI
With the Singularity Summit fast approaching, it’s worth spend a little time pondering the perennial question of nanotechnology vs AI: which will happen first, will they be independent, symbiotic, or synergetic, and so forth? I say perennial because this is a question that has been discussed at Foresight meetings ever since the first Conference 20… Continue reading Nanotech and AI
Accelerating Future » World Future Society 20 Forecasts for 2010-2025. Michael A is mildly skeptical about World Future Society claim we’ll have “human-level AI” by 2025. This caused me to think about whether I believed it myself. I think the answer depends on how you define it. I think AI is going to be really… Continue reading Human Level AI
Last week I posted an essay in which I claimed that the Singularity could be said to be halfway here already because we had already set up a huge program that was more or less running the world (and that it was fast becoming a computer program). What are the great concerns of the Singularitarians?… Continue reading ESP redux
Previous: What Singularity? Yesterday I took issue with Alfred Nordmann’s IEEE post in which he claimed that technological progress was slowing down instead of accelerating. I claimed instead that it was being distorted by the needs of the next rungs of the Maslow hierarchy, and that a huge portion of society’s energy was going into… Continue reading ESP
A couple of bloggers have noted the article at Wired about the Good Enough “revolution.” After some trial and error, Pure Digital released what it called the Flip Ultra in 2007. The stripped-down camcorder—like the Single Use Digital Camera—had lots of downsides. It captured relatively low-quality 640 x 480 footage at a time when Sony,… Continue reading Good enough … intelligence
As I pointed out yesterday, the internals of a super-AI are likely to look more or less like some organization of human-level AIs (which in turn are likely to be Societies of Mind of even simpler ones). So just drawing a box around it and calling it “weakly god-like” doesn’t help understand or design it. … Continue reading Mind Children
Consider this marvelous story by Richard Feynman: (watch it now, this won’t make too much sense otherwise) Feynman and his friend John Tukey discover that they have completely different internal ways of thinking, or at least of counting, even though they are using the same words to talk about what it is they’re doing. Consider… Continue reading The Black Box Fallacy
It’s a question of some interest whether the Singularity will consist of just more exponential growth, or whether some superexponential growth mode is likely to happen (or is even possible), such as would be required for a real mathematical singularity. On the side of exponential growth, as I pointed out here, is the fact that… Continue reading Singularity or Bust
