Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

lukeprog

In the Spring semester of 2011, I decided to see how effectively I could communicate the idea of a threat from AGI to my undergraduate classes. I spent three sessions on this for each of my two classes. My goal was to convince my students that all of us are going to be killed by an artificial intelligence. My strategy was to induce the students to come up with the ideas themselves. I gave out a survey before and after. An analysis of the survey responses indicates that the students underwent a statistically significant shift in their reported attitudes. After the three sessions, students reported believing that AGI would have a larger impact1 and also a worse impact2 than they originally reported believing.

Not a surprising result, perhaps, but the details of how Geoff taught AGI danger and the reactions of his students are quite interesting.

From Geoff Anders of Leverage Research:

In the Spring semester of 2011, I decided to see how effectively I could communicate the idea of a threat from AGI to my undergraduate classes. I spent three sessions on this for each of my two classes. My goal was to convince my students that all of us are going to be killed by an artificial intelligence. My strategy was to induce the students to come up with the ideas themselves. I gave out a survey before and after. An analysis of the survey responses indicates that the students underwent a statistically significant shift in their reported attitudes. After the three sessions, students reported believing that AGI would have a larger impact1 and also a worse impact2 than they originally reported believing.

Not a surprising result, perhaps, but the details of how Geoff taught AGI danger and the reactions of his students are quite interesting.

That's interesting since my impression if anything is the exact opposite. There seem to be a lot of people trying to apply Bayesian learning systems and expert learning systems to all sorts of different practical problems. I wonder if this is a new thing or whether I simply don't have a good view of the field.

For what it's worth, I consider Bayesian learning systems and expert learning systems to be "narrow" AI -- hence the example I gave of Watson.

I think Ben Goertzel's Novamente project is the closest extant project to a 'general' AI of any form that I've heard of.

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Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

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Students asked to defend AGI danger update in favor of AGI riskiness

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