gwern comments on Call for new SIAI Visiting Fellows, on a rolling basis - Less Wrong

29 Post author: AnnaSalamon 01 December 2009 01:42AM

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Comment author: gwern 11 December 2009 05:24:30PM * 0 points [-]

evidence for, apparently
Yes but shouldn't we use the earliest predictions by a person? Even a heavily biased person may produce reasonable estimates given enough data. The first few estimates are likely to be based most on intuition - or bias, in another word.
But which way? There may be a publication bias to 'true believers' but then there may also be a bias towards unobjectionably far away estimates like Minsky's 5 to 500 years. (One wonders what odds Minsky genuinely assigns to the first AI being created in 2500 AD.)
Reasonable. Optimism is an incentive to work, and self-deception is probably relevant.
Evidence for, isn't it? Especially if they assign even weak belief in significant life-extension breakthroughs, ~2050 is within their conceivable lifespan (since they know humans currently don't live past ~120, they'd have to be >~80 to be sure of not reaching 2050).