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MichaelAnissimov comments on [Altruist Support] Fix the SIAI's website (EDIT: or not. I'll do it) - Less Wrong Discussion

13 Post author: Giles 07 May 2011 06:36PM

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Comment author: MichaelAnissimov 11 May 2011 03:56:59AM *  2 points [-]

This all stems from a misunderstanding, which is that "Singularity" in that sentence implicitly means "positive Singularity". You see this usage quite often. To keep things concise, seemingly unnecessary qualifiers are sometimes dropped, but it's true that in the years since then, SIAI has so effectively raised the concept of a negative Singularity that people now think of Singularity as either positive or negative rather than just positive, a la Kurzweil & Singularity Hub. Ironic, though, that the memetic influence of the SIAI itself "obsoleted" its own website and that this could somehow be construed as incompetence in the organization!

Comment author: timtyler 11 May 2011 07:09:34AM *  1 point [-]

This all stems from a misunderstanding, which is that "Singularity" in that sentence implicitly means "positive Singularity".

A misunderstanding on the part of the article's author, presumably. The page continues:

If there's a Singularity effort that has a strong vision of this future and supports projects that explicitly focus on transhuman technologies such as brain-computer interfaces and self-improving Artificial Intelligence, then humanity may succeed in making the transition to this future a few years earlier, saving millions of people who would have otherwise died.

This adds support to the "mad rush -> reap benefits -> yay!" interpretation. That seems to be quite some distance from the current, more sensible idea that it makes more sense to be mainly concerned with how well the transition goes.

The SIAI didn't really invent machine intelligence doom-mongering marketing. Hugo de Garis and Kevin Warwick were doing that before them - and machines-gone-wrong has been a staple of science fiction for far longer.

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