Comment on Existential Risk and Public Relations

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 13:51:55 GMT

It was more than one person. Anyway, I haven't read all of the comments yet so I might have missed some specific links. If you are talking about links to articles written by EY himself where he argues about AI going FOOM, I commented on one of them.

Here is an example of the kind of transparency in the form of strict calculations, references and evidence I expect.

As I said, I'm not sure what other links you are talking about. But if you mean the kind of LW posts dealing with antipredictions, I'm not impressed. Predicting superhuman AI to be a possible outcome of AI research is not sufficient. Where is the difference between claiming the LHC will go FOOM? I'm sure someone like EY would be able to write a thousand posts around such a scenario telling me that the high risk associated with the LHC going FOOM does outweigh its low probability. There might be sound arguments to support this conclusion. But it is a conclusion and a framework of arguments based on a assumption that is itself of unknown credibility. So is it too much to ask for some transparet evidence to fortify this basic premise? Evidence that is not somewhere to be found within hundreds of posts not directly concerned with the evidence in question but rather arguing based on the very assumption it is trying to justify?

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