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
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
There’s a very nice post at IEET by Marcelo Rinesi entitled Education and Learning: Still in the Middle Ages. He points out that we’re pretty damn bad at education compared to the improvements we’ve seen in most other endeavors: Our lecture halls are better than those of the Middle Ages, our textbooks friendlier than those… Continue reading Education
After hearing an excellent talk by Willow Garage president Steven Cousins at PARC last Thursday, I wangled a visit to the company Monday and talked to a few more people. Willow Garage is a research robotics company in Silicon Valley which has a unique mission for a start-up. They are oriented to making an impact… Continue reading Willow Garage Robotics
This is essentially a follow-on to yesterday’s post about increasing intelligence (you might want to go back and read the comment by Michael A.). The main idea behind that essay was that intelligence consists of a varied lot of skills, which we’re building one at a time (or at least in separate efforts). When we… Continue reading The Software of Civilization
About a month ago, the web was all agog over the announcement of DARPA’s Physical Intelligence program — Wired wrote: The idea behind Darpa’s latest venture, called “Physical Intelligence” (PI) is to prove, mathematically, that the human mind is nothing more than parts and energy. In other words, all brain activities — reasoning, emoting, processing… Continue reading Physical Intelligence
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov continues the discussion about nanofactories. He says a number of reasonable things, but then mischaracterizes, or at least greatly oversimplifies, Foresight’s position on nanofactories and self-replicating machines in general: The general implied position of the Foresight Institute appears to be, “we’ll figure these things out as we go, MNT… Continue reading Replicating nanofactories redux
Over at Accelerating Future, Michael Anissimov has a post about self-replication in which he seems to find it remarkable that Foresight, among others, can view a world containing mechanical replicators with aplomb: What is remarkable are those that seem to argue, like Ray Kurzweil, the Foresight Institute, and the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology, that humanity… Continue reading Self-replicating nanofactories?
Evolution has adapted what were the bones of the fingers of the bat’s ancestors to form the skeleton of its wing. Similarly, in technology, when one element of a system is capable of expanding to take up new functions, it can substitute for what might have been expected to be different ways to achieve the… Continue reading Bat Wings
