NihilCredo comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (676)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 August 2010 02:40:43AM 3 points [-]

I agree somewhat with this as a set of conclusions, but your argument deserves to get downvoted because you've made statements that are highly controversial. The primary issue is that, if one thinks that an AI can engage in recursive self-improvement and can do so quickly, then once there's an AI that's at all capable of such improvement, the AI will rapidly move outside our control. There are arguments against such a possibility being likely, but this is not a trivial matter. Moreover, comparing the situation to fiction is unhelpful- just because something is common in fiction that's not an argument that such a situation can't actually happen in practice. Reversed stupidity is not intelligence.

Comment author: NihilCredo 03 August 2010 03:09:04AM *  2 points [-]

your argument deserves to get downvoted because you've made statements that are highly controversial

Did you accidentally pick the wrong adjective, or did you seriously mean that controversy is unwelcome in LW comment threads?

Comment author: ata 03 August 2010 03:18:33AM *  4 points [-]

I read the subtext as "...you've made statements that are highly controversial without attempting to support them". Suggesting that there will be plenty of time to debug, maintain, and manually improve anything that actually fits the definition of "AGI" is a very significant disagreement with some fairly standard LW conclusions, and it may certainly be stated, but not as a casual assumption or a fact; it should be accompanied by an accordingly serious attempt to justify it.

Comment author: JoshuaZ 03 August 2010 04:07:00PM 1 point [-]

No. See ata's reply which summarizes exactly what I meant.