Robin Hanson

Comment Threads

• Oren commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  There appears to be a bizarre assumption on both your and Godel's part that an AI wouldn't be able to understand that the statement "this statement is not true" is an amusing paradox with no truth value. Semantic meaning comes from associating words with their lived experience values. When we have built a strong AI, all of its symbology will have come to it through sensed experience and not through human programming. We will have simply created the substrate on which it flourished. I believe that we will absolutely build a strong AI within the next couple of decades. I...
• Sean Eric Fagan commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  You seem to be making the assumption that an AI (or, as DKM prefers, Machine Intelligence) is the same as "an algorithmically consistent symbolic logic processor." That is an unfounded assumption. Also, do please stop throwing around accusation of "godlike hubris" at people. It's rude, and the humour value goes away quickly....
• https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnT67_6BVqBlB-qP_BXrHMOf6HRlyl3XFY commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  @Sean Eric Fagan: I was under the impression that a Turing machine was an "algorithmically consistent symbolic logic processor"? In which case it would not be sufficient to run a human brain simulation... I guess. @Oren: I've always figured that strong AI will be extremely hard to build. I mean, it took almost a billion years of biology bootstrapping itself to get just a few highly intelligent species. Evolving computer/software design is only relatively faster. @lishlash: At this point I don't know if you know if you're arrogant in your superior knowledge, or just trolling, but either way being impolite...
• https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawnT67_6BVqBlB-qP_BXrHMOf6HRlyl3XFY commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  BTW I just finished skimming through R. Scott Bakker's Neuropath. (Will actually read the whole thing some other time, right now I need to remain somewhat functional.) Anyway it strikes me that it's much easier to alter the way we think, than to create something from scratch that thinks. Neuroscience is going to blur the line between psychiatry and mind control quite a bit in the coming years... Things could get extremely ugly....
• Phil Osborn commented on The Singularity Is Further Than It Appears
  Great article. Totally reasonable. I was happy but chagrined to see a couple of arguments used that I came up with in the '60's - the inevitable influence of the brain's electrical fields on the probabality weighting of the firing of individual neurons, and the role of various neurotransmitters and facilitators in focusing the functioning, timing and readiness to function of classes of neurons. I used these considerations from the late '60's in my arguments against those who proposed that human-equivalent AI would be soon to come - or that brains were just wet-ware computers. These facts, along with recent...