Squark comments on Stupid Questions Thread - January 2014 - Less Wrong

10 Post author: RomeoStevens 13 January 2014 02:31AM

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Comment author: JoshuaFox 13 January 2014 07:42:58AM *  24 points [-]

If it turns out that the whole MIRI/LessWrong memeplex is massively confused, what would that look like?

Note that in the late 19th century, many leading intellectuals followed a scientific/rationalist/atheist/utopian philosophy, socialism, which later turned out to be a horrible way to arrange society. See my article on this. (And it's not good enough to say that we're really rational, scientific, altruist, utilitarian, etc, in contrast to those people -- they thought the same.)

So, how might we find that all these ideas are massively wrong?

Comment author: Squark 13 January 2014 06:43:38PM 2 points [-]

Define "massively wrong". My personal opinions (stated w/o motivation for brevity):

  • Building AGI from scratch is likely to be unfeasible (although we don't know nearly enough to discard the risk altogether)
  • Mind uploading is feasible (and morally desirable) but will trigger intelligence growth of marginal speed rather than a "foom"
  • "Correct" morality is low Kolmogorov complexity and conforms with radical forms of transhumanism

Infeasibility of "classical" AGI and feasibility of mind uploading should be scientifically provable.

So: My position is very different from MIRI's. Nevertheless I think LessWrong is very interesting and useful (in particular I'm all for promoting rationality) and MIRI is doing very interesting and useful research. Does it count as "massively wrong"?

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