Deutsch is interesting. He seems very close to the LW camp, and I think he's someone LWers should at least be familiar with. (This article is not as good an introduction as The Beginning of Infinity, I think.)
I suspect, personally, that the conflict between "Popperian conjecture and criticism" and the LW brand of Bayesianism is a paper tiger. See this comment thread in particular.
Deutsch is right that a huge part of artificial general intelligence is the ability to infer explanatory models from experience from the complete (infinite!) set of possible explanations, rather than just fit parameters to a limited set of hardcoded explanatory models (as AI programs today work). But that's what I think people here think (generally under the name Solomonoff induction).
Deutsch is interesting. He seems very close to the LW camp, and I think he's someone LWers should at least be familiar with.
Deutsch seems pretty clueless in the section quoted below. I don't see why students should be interested in what he has to say on this topic.
...It was a failure to recognise that what distinguishes human brains from all other physical systems is qualitatively different from all other functionalities, and cannot be specified in the way that all other attributes of computer programs can be. It cannot be programmed by any of the techn
Folks here should be familiar with most of these arguments. Putting some interesting quotes below:
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/david-deutsch-artificial-intelligence/
"Creative blocks: The very laws of physics imply that artificial intelligence must be possible. What's holding us up?"
He also says confusing things about induction being inadequate for creativity which I'm guessing he couldn't support well in this short essay (perhaps he explains better in his books). Not quoting here. His attack on Bayesianism as an explanation for intelligence is valid and interesting, but could be wrong. Given what we know about neural networks, something like this does happen in the brain, and possibly even at a concept level.
His final conclusions are disagreeable. He somehow concludes that the principal bottleneck in AGI research is a philosophical one.
In his last paragraph, he makes the following controversial statement:
This would be false if, for example, the mother controls gene expression while a foetus develops and helps shape the brain. We should be able to answer this question definitively once we can grow human babies completely in vitro. Another problem would be the impact of the cultural environment. A way to answer this question would be to see if our Stone Age ancestors would be classified as AGIs under a reasonable definition