dlthomas comments on Thoughts on the Singularity Institute (SI) - Less Wrong

256 Post author: HoldenKarnofsky 11 May 2012 04:31AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (1270)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: dlthomas 15 May 2012 12:59:21AM 0 points [-]

One complication here is that you ideally want it to be vague in the same ways the original was vague; I am not convinced this is always possible while still having the results feel natural/idomatic.

Comment author: Bugmaster 15 May 2012 01:01:37AM 1 point [-]

IMO it would be enough to translate the original text in such a fashion that some large proportion (say, 90%) of humans who are fluent in both languages would look at both texts and say, "meh... close enough".

Comment author: dlthomas 15 May 2012 02:23:47AM 0 points [-]

My point was just that there's a whole lot of little issues that pull in various directions if you're striving for ideal. What is/isn't close enough can depend very much on context. Certainly, for any particular purpose something less than that will be acceptable; how gracefully it degrades no doubt depends on context, and likely won't be uniform across various types of difference.

Comment author: Bugmaster 15 May 2012 02:26:14AM 1 point [-]

Agreed, but my point was that I'd settle for an AI who can translate texts as well as a human could (though hopefully a lot faster). You seem to be thinking in terms of an AI who can do this much better than a human could, and while this is a worthy goal, it's not what I had in mind.