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The difficulty in predicting AI, in three lines — LessWrong

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The difficulty in predicting AI, in three lines

by Stuart_Armstrong

2nd Oct 2012

1 min read

2

An over-simplification, but an evocative one:

The social sciences are contentious, their predictions questionable.
And yet social sciences use the scientific method; AI predictions generally don't.
Hence predictions involving human-level AI should be treated as less certain than any prediction in the social sciences.

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Shmi14y20

And yet social sciences use the scientific method; AI predictions generally don't.

Can you please clarify this point?

Stuart_Armstrong14y20

The social sciences are sciences; AI predictions are mainly speculative thinking by people who just put on their thinking caps and think really really hard about the future (see some of the examples in http://lesswrong.com/lw/e79/ai_timeline_prediction_data/).