In those posts you are arguing something different from what I was talking about. Sure chimps will never make better technology than humans, but sometimes making more advanced clever technology is not what you want to do and be positively detrimental to your chances of shaping the world to a desirable state. The arms race for nuclear weapons for example or bio-weapons research.
If humans manage to invent a virus that wipes us out, would you still call that intelligent? If so it is not that sort of intelligence we need to create... we need to create things that win in the end, not have short term wins and then destroy itself.
If humans manage to invent a virus that wipes us out, would you still call that intelligent?
Super-plagues and other doomsday tools are possible with current technology. Effective countermeasures are not. Ergo, we need more intelligence, ASAP.
In the early 1980s Douglas Lenat wrote EURISKO, a program Eliezer called "[maybe] the most sophisticated self-improving AI ever built". The program reportedly had some high-profile successes in various domains, like becoming world champion at a certain wargame or designing good integrated circuits.
Despite requests Lenat never released the source code. You can download an introductory paper: "Why AM and EURISKO appear to work" [PDF]. Honestly, reading it leaves a programmer still mystified about the internal workings of the AI: for example, what does the main loop look like? Researchers supposedly answered such questions in a more detailed publication, "EURISKO: A program that learns new heuristics and domain concepts." Artificial Intelligence (21): pp. 61-98. I couldn't find that paper available for download anywhere, and being in Russia I found it quite tricky to get a paper version. Maybe you Americans will have better luck with your local library? And to the best of my knowledge no one ever succeeded in (or even seriously tried) confirming Lenat's EURISKO results.
Today in 2009 this state of affairs looks laughable. A 30-year-old pivotal breakthrough in a large and important field... that never even got reproduced. What if it was a gigantic case of Clever Hans? How do you know? You're supposed to be a scientist, little one.
So my proposal to the LessWrong community: let's reimplement EURISKO!
We have some competent programmers here, don't we? We have open source tools and languages that weren't around in 1980. We can build an open source implementation available for all to play. In my book this counts as solid progress in the AI field.
Hell, I'd do it on my own if I had the goddamn paper.
Update: RichardKennaway has put Lenat's detailed papers up online, see the comments.