JoshuaZ comments on The Curve of Capability - Less Wrong

18 Post author: rwallace 04 November 2010 08:22PM

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Comment author: JoshuaZ 05 November 2010 04:57:21AM *  4 points [-]

Turing never discussed much like a Singularity to my knowledge. What you may be thinking of is how in his original article proposing the Turing Test he said that he expected that it would take around fifty years for machines to pass the Turing Test. He wrote the essay in 1950. But, Turing's remark is not the same claim as a Singularity occurring in 2000. Turing was off for when we'd have AI. As far as I know, he didn't comment on anything like a Singularity.

Comment author: rwallace 05 November 2010 05:02:06AM 0 points [-]

Ah, that's the one I'm thinking of -- he didn't comment on a Singularity, but did predict human level AI by 2000. Some later people did, but I didn't save any citations at the time and a quick Google search didn't find any, which is one of the reasons I'm not writing a post on failed Singularity predictions.

Comment author: steven0461 05 November 2010 07:27:20PM 3 points [-]

Another reason, hopefully, is that there would always have been a wide range of predictions, and there's a lot of room for proving points by being selective about which ones to highlight, and even if you looked at all predictions there are selection effects in that the ones that were repeated or even stated in the first place tend to be the more extreme ones.