Hi everybody, first time here over from bloggingheads. At the start of the diavlog I thought I'd sympathize with Lanier but his circular reasoning really rankled me. The repeated appeals to his own expertise were really obnoxious.
Has Eliezer ever examined some the socio-ecological assumptions of his singularity model? It seems to me that it's pretty dependent on substantial funding for this type of research, which isn't likely in the event of large-scale energy/resource shortages or nuclear war. I'm looking through the "future" and "disaster" posts, but if someone could point me in the right direction I'd be grateful. I'm finding a few mentions of things "going wrong" etc but I think he's referring to the development of evil AGI and not these more mundane constraints.
You can now count me among your regular readers, Eliezer. You should do a diavlog with Bob Wright - he's a good interviewer with a sense of humor and you guys would have some stuff to discuss when it comes to his Nonzero thesis (which I find specious).
My Bloggingheads.tv interview with Jaron Lanier is up. Reductionism, zombies, and questions that you're not allowed to answer:
This ended up being more of me interviewing Lanier than a dialog, I'm afraid. I was a little too reluctant to interrupt. But you at least get a chance to see the probes I use, and Lanier's replies to them.
If there are any BHTV heads out there who read Overcoming Bias and have something they'd like to talk to me about, do let me or our kindly producers know.