Comment on Open Thread June 2010, Part 2

Mon, 14 Jun 2010 05:24:13 GMT

I'm not sure that your criticism completely holds water. Friendly AI is simply put only a worry that has convinced some Singularitarians. One might not be deeply concerned about that (Possible example reasons: 1) You expect uploading to come well before general AI. 2) you think that the probable technical path to AI will force a lot more stages of AI of much lower intelligence which will be likely to give us good data for solving the problem)

I agree that this Facebook group does look very much like something one would expect out of a missonizing religion. This section in particular looked like a caricature:

To raise awareness of the Singularity, which is expected to occur no later than the year 2045, we must reach out to everyone on the 1st day of every month.

At 20:45 hours (8:45pm) on the 1st day of each month we will send SINGULARITY MESSAGES to friends or strangers.

Example message:

"Nanobot revolution, AI aware, technological utopia: Singularity2045."

The certainty for 2045 is the most glaring aspect of this aside from the pseudo-missionary aspect. Also note that some of the people associated with this group are very prominent Singularitarians and Transhumanists. Aubrey de Grey is listed as an administrator.

But, one should remember that reversed stupidity is not intelligence. Moreover, there's a reason that missionaries sound like this: They have a very high confidence in their correctness. If one had a similarly high confidence in the probability of a Singularity event, and you thought that that event was more likely to occur safely if more people were aware of it, and was more likely to occur soon if more people were aware of it, and buy into something like the galactic colonization argument, and you believe that sending messages like this has a high chance of getting people to be aware and take you seriously then this is a reasonable course of action. Now, that's a lot of premises, some of which have likelyhoods others which have very low ones. Obviously there's a very low probability that sending out these sorts of messages is at all a net benefit. Indeed, I have to wonder if there's any deliberate mimicry of how religious groups send out messages or whether successfully reproducing memes naturally hit on a small set of methods of reproduction (but if that were the case I think they'd be more likely to hit an actually useful method of reproduction). And in fairness, they may just be using a general model for how one goes about raising awareness for a cause and how it matters. For some causes, simple, frequent appeals to emotion are likely an effective method (for example, making people aware of how common sexual assault is on college campuses, short messages that shock probably do a better job than lots of fairly dreary statistics). So then the primary mistake is just using the wrong model of how to communicate to people.

Discuss