Comment on Risks from AI and Charitable Giving

Wed, 14 Mar 2012 21:32:54 GMT

Any scenario presented in any level of detail can be faulted with elaborate scenarios why it would not work.

That is a rather uncharitable interpretation of my words. I am fully willing to grant that your scenarios are possible, but are they likely ? If you showed me a highly detailed plan for building a new kind of skyscraper out of steel and concrete, I might try and poke some holes in it, but I'd agree that it would probably work. On the other hand, if you showed me a highly detailed plan for building a space elevator out of candy-canes, I would conclude that it would probably fail to work. I would conclude this not merely because I've never seen a space elevator before, but also because I know that candy-canes make a poor construction material. Sure, you could postulate super-strong diamondoid candy-canes of some sort, but then you'd need to explain where you're going to get them from.

there are people who just never seem to think it has a non-zero chance of working because it has not yet worked.

For the record, I believe that cryonics has a non-zero chance of working.

...until I was blue in the face, check whether you had changed your opinion and even if you said you changed it a little, you still would not do a single thing in your life differently

I think this would depend on how much my opinion had, in fact, changed. If you're going to simply go ahead and assume that I'm a disingenuous liar, then sure, there's no point in talking to me. Is there anything I can say or do (short of agreeing with you unconditionally) to prove my sincerity, or is the mere fact of my disagreement with you evidence enough of my dishonesty and/or stupidity ?

The point of writing is to assemble useful information for those receptive, and use those not receptive to clean up errors or omissions.

And yet, de-converted atheists as well as converted theists do exist. Perhaps more importantly, the above sentence makes you sound as though you'd made up your mind on the topic, and thus nothing and no one could persuade you to change it in any way -- which is kind of like what you're accusing me of doing.

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