= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Thomas comments on Q&A with experts on risks from AI #1 - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (66)
Almost all top level physicists in 1930 were highly dismissive about the atomic bomb. Except a handful of them, like Leo Szilard, who even patented it.
Yet, you could not say that Rutherford hasn't discovered a thing, because he did. He split the atom, but did not believe that atoms are splitable enough for an atomic bomb.
What important things have those characters you've interviewed discovered?
There are counter-examples where people were highly optimistic. One spectacular example would be the attempt of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell to derive all mathematical truths from a well-defined set of axioms and inference rules in symbolic logic. Recursive self-improvement (the strong SI definition) or "friendliness" might or might not be similar ideas.
I think that the lack of important discoveries with respect to artificial general intelligence is part of the reason for their reservation.
I would ask those from Watson team, for example. Not an arrogant "semantic web expert".
I am asking every single computer scientist, AI and machine learning researcher. Many hundreds. "Semantic web experts" are part of that group. So is the team from IBM Watson. I'll get to them soon.
That's quite a few...
More importantly it is a class that increases (and turns over) faster than XiXiDu writes emails. It's a good thing XiXiDu isn't a GAI with a narrow goal. We'd end up with a suburb titled with a XiXidunium spam-bot!
Whatever Pat Hayes has invented or discovered (and TBH I would guess it's more likely to be impressive than not), his position is a very common one and worth writing a proper response to, not ad-hom dismissiveness.
Dismissing someone who assigns zero probabilities to things seems like a great time saver.
Unless they just use zero as a shorthand for "a very very tiny probability", as many people do.
For expected utility calculations in Pascal-wagerish scenarios there can be huge difference between various very very tiny magnitudes of probability. "Zero" actually means "so small that it is reasonable to ignore the possibility", i.e. the expected (dis)utility is tiny compared to other choices.
You've learned that there's something such a person doesn't understand, but when so few people do understand that, it's not very strong evidence on the value of continuing to talk to them.
Most people drastically overestimate the value of talking. Most humans don't really believe in words. This is doubly true when discussing complex subjects with large inference jumps.
FTFY.
Thank you.