if what we are observing doesn't constitute evidence against the Singularity in your opinion, then what would?
I'm not marchdown, but:
Estimating the probability of a Singularity requires looking at various possible advantages of digital minds and asking what would constitute evidence against such advantages being possible. Some possibilities:
Depending on how you define "the Singularity", some of these may be irrelevant. Personally, I think the most important aspect of the Singularity is whether minds drastically different from humans will eventually take over, and how rapid the transition could be. Excluding the possibility of a rapid takeover would require at least strong evidence against gains from increased serial power, increased parallel power, improved algorithms, new mental modules, copyability, and transfer of skills. That seems quite hard to come by, especially once you take into account the fact that it's not enough to show that e.g. current trends in hardware development show mostly increases in parallel instead of serial power - to refute the gains from increased serial power, you'd also have to show that this is indeed some deep physical limit which cannot be overcome.
Superior processing power. Evidence against would be the human brain already being close to the physical limits of what is possible.
It is often cited how much faster expert systems are at their narrow area of expertise. But does that mean that the human brain is actually slower or that it can't focus its resources on certain tasks? Take for example my ability to simulated some fantasy environment, off the top of my head, in front of my mind's eye. Or the ability of humans to run real-time egocentric world-simulations to extrapolate and predict the behav...
What did Will mean? To take an idea seriously is “to update a belief and then accurately and completely propagate that belief update through the entire web of beliefs in which it is embedded,” as in a Bayesian belief network (see right).
Belief propagation is what happened, for example, when I first encountered that thundering paragraph from I.J. Good (1965):
Good’s paragraph ran me over like a train. Not because it was absurd, but because it was clearly true. Intelligence explosion was a direct consequence of things I already believed, I just hadn’t noticed! Humans do not automatically propagate their beliefs, so I hadn’t noticed that my worldview already implied intelligence explosion.
I spent a week looking for counterarguments, to check whether I was missing something, and then accepted intelligence explosion to be likely (so long as scientific progress continued). And though I hadn’t read Eliezer on the complexity of value, I had read David Hume and Joshua Greene. So I already understood that an arbitrary artificial intelligence would almost certainly not share our values.
Accepting my belief update about intelligence explosion, I propagated its implications throughout my web of beliefs. I realized that:
I had encountered the I.J. Good paragraph on Less Wrong, so I put my other projects on hold and spent the next month reading almost everything Eliezer had written. I also found articles by Nick Bostrom and Steve Omohundro. I began writing articles for Less Wrong and learning from the community. I applied to Singularity Institute’s Visiting Fellows program and was accepted. I quit my job in L.A., moved to Berkeley, worked my ass off, got hired, and started collecting research related to rationality and intelligence explosion.
My story surprises people because it is unusual. Human brains don’t usually propagate new beliefs so thoroughly.
But this isn’t just another post on taking ideas seriously. Will already offered some ideas on how to propagate beliefs. He also listed some ideas that most people probably aren’t taking seriously enough. My purpose here is to examine one prerequisite of successful belief propagation: actually making sure your beliefs are connected to each other in the first place.
If your beliefs aren’t connected to each other, there may be no paths along which you can propagate a new belief update.
I’m not talking about the problem of free-floating beliefs that don’t control your anticipations. No, I’m talking about “proper” beliefs that require observation, can be updated by evidence, and pay rent in anticipated experiences. The trouble is that even proper beliefs can be inadequately connected to other proper beliefs inside the human mind.
I wrote this post because I'm not sure what the "making sure your beliefs are actually connected in the first place" skill looks like when broken down to the 5-second level.
I was chatting about this with atucker, who told me he noticed that successful businessmen may have this trait more often than others. But what are they doing, at the 5-second level? What are people like Eliezer and Carl doing? How does one engage in the purposeful decompartmentalization of one's own mind?