Future of Moral Machines - New York Times [link]

Dr_Manhattan

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/the-future-of-moral-machines/

Many Singularitarians assume a lot, not the least of which is that intelligence is fundamentally a computational process.

What else it would be? Except the divine origin of thoughts nothing was submitted as an alternative so far.

Building an AI does not require it being a computer - it could be a bunch of rubber bands if that's what worked. The assumption is more like intelligence is not inherently mysterious, and humans are not at some special perfect point of intelligence.

11TheOtherDave15y

I distrust "what else would it be"-style arguments; they are ultimately appeals to inadequate imagination. Certainly of the things we understand reasonably well, computation is the only candidate that could explain intelligence; if intelligence weren't fundamentally a computational process it would have to fundamentally be something we don't yet understand. Just to be clear, I'm not challenging the conclusion; given the sorts of things that intelligence does, and the sorts of things that computations do, that intelligence is a form of computation seems pretty likely to me. What I'm pushing back on is the impulse to play burden-of-proof tennis with questions like this, rather than accepting the burden of proof and trying to meet it.