From Gleick's The Information:
[John Wilkins (1614-1672)] set out to determine how a restricted set of symbols — perhaps just two, three, or five — might be made to stand for a whole alphabet. They would have to be used in combination. For example, a set of five symbols — a, b, c, d, e — used in pairs could replace an alphabet of twenty-five letters...
...So even a small symbol set could be arranged to express any message at all. However, with a small symbol set, a given message requires a longer string of characters — “more Labour and Time,” he wrote. Wilkins did not explain that 25 = 52, nor that three symbols taken in threes (aaa, aab, aac,…) produce twenty-seven possibilities because 33 = 27. But he clearly understood the underlying mathematics. His last example was a binary code, awkward though this was to express in words:
Two symbols. In groups of five. “Yield thirty two Differences.”
That word, differences, must have struck Wilkins’s readers (few though they were) as an odd choice. But it was deliberate and pregnant with meaning. Wilkins was reaching for a conception of information in its purest, most general form. Writing was only a special case: "For in the general we must note, That whatever is capable of a competent Difference, perceptible to any Sense, may be a sufficient Means whereby to express the Cogitations." A difference could be “two Bells of different Notes”; or “any Object of Sight, whether Flame, Smoak, &c.”; or trumpets, cannons, or drums. Any difference meant a binary choice. Any binary choice began the expressing of cogitations. Here, in this arcane and anonymous treatise of 1641, the essential idea of information theory poked to the surface of human thought, saw its shadow, and disappeared again for four hundred years.
More (#1) from The Information:
...The global expansion of the telegraph continued to surprise even its backers. When the first telegraph office opened in New York City on Wall Street, its biggest problem was the Hudson River. The Morse system ran a line sixty miles up the eastern side until it reached a point narrow enough to stretch a wire across. Within a few years, though, an insulated cable was laid under the harbor. Across the English Channel, a submarine cable twenty-five miles long made the connection between Dover and Calais in 1851. Soon after, a k
One open question in AI risk strategy is: Can we trust the world's elite decision-makers (hereafter "elites") to navigate the creation of human-level AI (and beyond) just fine, without the kinds of special efforts that e.g. Bostrom and Yudkowsky think are needed?
Some reasons for concern include:
But if you were trying to argue for hope, you might argue along these lines (presented for the sake of argument; I don't actually endorse this argument):
The basic structure of this 'argument for hope' is due to Carl Shulman, though he doesn't necessarily endorse the details. (Also, it's just a rough argument, and as stated is not deductively valid.)
Personally, I am not very comforted by this argument because:
Obviously, there's a lot more for me to spell out here, and some of it may be unclear. The reason I'm posting these thoughts in such a rough state is so that MIRI can get some help on our research into this question.
In particular, I'd like to know: