Wasted life

Stuart_Armstrong

It's just occurred to me that, giving all the cheerful risk stuff I work with, one of the most optimistic things people could say to me would be:

"You've wasted your life. Nothing of what you've done is relevant or useful."

That would make me very happy. Of course, that only works if it's credible.

It's just occurred to me that, giving all the cheerful risk stuff I work with, one of the most optimistic things people could say to me would be:

"You've wasted your life. Nothing of what you've done is relevant or useful."

That would make me very happy. Of course, that only works if it's credible.

If people had reasoned that way in the 18th century, they would have correctly predicted the risks of nanotech and maybe biotech.

How useful that would have been, though? I don't think you can have a single useful insight about making safe nanotech or biotech from thinking in terms of abstract 'life force'. edit: also one can end up predicting a lot of invalid stuff this way, like zombies...

Anyway, how do you tell which concepts are "abstraction porn" and which aren't?

Concepts that are not built bottom up are usually abstraction porn.

This monolithic "intelligence" concept where you can have grand-feeling insights without having to be concerned with any hard details like algorithmic complexities, existing problem solving algorithms, the different aspects of intelligence such as problem solving, world model, sensory processing, without being consideration that the intelligence has to work in decentralized manner due to speed of light lag (and the parts of it have to implement some sort of efficient protocol for cooperation... mankind got such protocol, we call it morality), etc, is as suspicious as a concept can be. Ditto the 'utility' as per LW (shouldn't be confused with utility as in a mathematical function inside some of current software).

edit: Actually, do you guys even use any concept built from bottom up to think of AI ?

How useful would knowing the AI would be using, say, A* search, as opposed to meta reasonings on what it is likely to be searching for? We know both from computer science and our own minds that effective heuristics exist to approximately solve most problems. The precise bottom up knowledge you refer to is akin to knowing that the travelling salesman problem can only be solved (assuming NP not P) in exponential time; the meta-knowledge "good polymomial time heuristics exist for most problems" is much more useful to predicting the future of AI.