NPR show All Things Considered on the Singularity and SIAI

arundelo

The NPR show All Things Considered did a short story on the Singularity, including interviews with Eliezer Yudkowsky and others involved with SIAI:

http://www.npr.org/2011/01/11/132840775/The-Singularity-Humanitys-Last-Invention

EY's one quote included the phrase "intergalactic civilization" was a cringe moment for me- it sounds too much like sci-fi to register with even the brightest and most rational of NPR's demographic.

If you really wanted to get AI researchers and other academics to take you serious then making the term Singularity part of the name of your charity is a bad idea in the first place. Getting the mainstream to support you might work vice versa though, almost nobody will care about some academic treatment of friendly AI but a lot will read on when someone starts talking about an intergalactic civilisation being destroyed by superhuman AI.

This comment raised an interesting question: is it more important to get noticed/supported by other AI researchers, or by the general public?

2timtyler15y

I expect that the AAAI have cold feet - since to them, the SIAI probably looks like a bunch of amateur upstarts who are spreading FUD about everyone else's efforts being dangerous. Funding advanced machine intelligence research a decade or so before it has much of a chance to pay off is not easy, and - from the point of view many others in the field - the SIAI can easily appear to be be hindering as much as helping: I've seen a number of researchers complaining about this - most recently Eray Ozkural: [...] It does look as though that is part of the plan to me.