Could you write a few words on your perception of risks associated with technological progress and how projects like yours influence the chance of a possible positive or negative Singularity?
I'd also be interested in how you would answer these questions.
There's the rub! I happen to value technological progress as an intrinsic good, so classifying a Singularity as "positive" or "negative" is not easy for me. (I reject the notion that one can factorize intelligence from goals, so that one could take a superintelligence and fuse it with a goal to optimize for paperclips. Perhaps one could give it a compulsion to optimize for paperclips, but I'd expect it to either put the compulsion on hold while it develops amazing fabrication, mining and space travel technologies, and never completely t...
This post is shameless self-promotion, but I'm told that's probably okay in the Discussion section. For context, as some of you are aware, I'm aiming to model C. elegans based on systematic high-throughput experiments - that is, to upload a worm. I'm still working on course requirements and lab training at Harvard's Biophysics Ph.D. program, but this remains the plan for my thesis.
Last semester I gave this lecture to Marvin Minsky's AI class, because Marvin professes disdain for everything neuroscience, and I wanted to give his students—and him—a fair perspective of how basic neuroscience might be changing for the better, and seems a particularly exciting field to be in right about now. The lecture is about 22 minutes long, followed by over an hour of questions and answers, which cover a lot of the memespace that surrounds this concept. Afterward, several students reported to me that their understanding of neuroscience was transformed.
I only just now got to encoding and uploading this recording; I believe that many of the topics covered could be of interest to the LW community (especially those with a background in AI and an interest in brains), perhaps worthy of discussion, and I hope you agree.