...has finally been published.
Contents:
- Uziel Awret - Introduction
- Susan Blackmore - She Won’t Be Me
- Damien Broderick - Terrible Angels: The Singularity and Science Fiction
- Barry Dainton - On Singularities and Simulations
- Daniel Dennett - The Mystery of David Chalmers
- Ben Goertzel - Should Humanity Build a Global AI Nanny to Delay the Singularity Until It’s Better Understood?
- Susan Greenfield - The Singularity: Commentary on David Chalmers
- Robin Hanson - Meet the New Conflict, Same as the Old Conflict
- Francis Heylighen - Brain in a Vat Cannot Break Out
- Marcus Hutter - Can Intelligence Explode?
- Drew McDermott - Response to ‘The Singularity’ by David Chalmers [this link is a McDermott-corrected version, and therefore preferred to the version that was published in JCS]
- Jurgen Schmidhuber - Philosophers & Futurists, Catch Up!
- Frank Tipler - Inevitable Existence and Inevitable Goodness of the Singularity
- Roman Yampolskiy - Leakproofing the Singularity: Artificial Intelligence Confinement Problem
The issue consists of responses to Chalmers (2010). Future volumes will contain additional articles from Shulman & Bostrom, Igor Aleksander, Richard Brown, Ray Kurzweil, Pamela McCorduck, Chris Nunn, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jesse Prinz, Susan Schneider, Murray Shanahan, Burt Voorhees, and a response from Chalmers.
McDermott's chapter should be supplemented with this, which he says he didn't have space for in his JCS article.
Everybody on all sides of this discussion is a suspect of a bullshit trader or a bullshit producer.
That includes me, you, Vinge, Kurzweill, Jürgen S., Ben Goertzel - everybody is a suspect. Including the investigators from any side.
Now, I'll clear my position. The whole AI business is an Edisonian, not an Einsteinian project. I don't see a need for some enormous scientific breakthroughs before it can be done. No, to me it looks like - we have Maxwell equations for some time now, can we build an electric lamp?
Edison is just one among many, who is claiming it is almost done in his lab. It is not certain what's the real situation in the Menlo Park. The fact that an apprentice who left Edison is saying that there is no hope for a light bulb is not very informative. As it is not, that another apprentice still working there, is euphoric. It doesn't matter even what the Royal Queen Science Society back in old England has to say. Or a simple peasant.
You just can't meta judge very productively.
But you can judge is it possible to have an object as an electric driven lamp? Or can you build a nuclear fusion reactor? Or can you built an intelligent program?
If it is possible, how hard is to actually build one of those? May takes a long time, even if it is. May take a short time, if it is.
The only real question is - can it be done and if yes - how? If no, also good. It just isn't.
But you have to stay on topic, not meta topic, I think.
To me it looks like that AGI researchers are simply rubbing amber with fur while claiming that they are on the verge of building a full-scale electricity-producing fusion power plant.
It is possible to create a Matrix style virtual reality. It is possible to create antimatter weapons. That doesn't mean that it is feasible. It also says nothing about timeframes.
... (read more)