Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

XiXiDu

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

There's something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.

It seems that:

The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans

I don't know how to interpret the evidence from the industrial revolution, and I don't really see a pattern. But I think the place to look for a pattern is here, not in recent tech industry history.

The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.

I am not so confident of this. There were a bunch of early hominids, other than H. Sap, whose intelligence is not well established. Suppose, say, it turns out that Neanderthals were 7% smarter on average than modern humans, but lost out evolutionarily because they had too much body hair. What would that imply about the importance of intelligence?

1timtyler15y

What do you mean by that? You think Google isn't going to go on to develop machine intelligence? Surely they are among the front runners - though admittedly there are some other players in the game. This is not a case of hanging around for some future event. [...] The wording of the question was: [...] It doesn't say the control is kept indefinitely. So - for instance - Sergey and Larry might die - but they will still have quickly come to control a larger fraction of the world than any farmer or industrialist.

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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