Huw's idea that intelligence will escape the constraints of biology is probably wrong. The reason is that machine intelligence will be biological. Siri, Google, Watson etc are firmly biological. Non-biologial things are rocks and stars - things to which the idea of cumulative adaptive evolution does not apply.
(Found a bug in the implementation of the karma penalty: if an ancestor comment goes to -4, responses to any of its descendants will incur the karma penalty. So far, so correct. However, if an ancestor comment goes back from -4 to -3, and is thus eligible for answers without a karma penalty, that change will not propagate down the tree. I.e., I can make this comment, having upvoted the parent from -4 to -3, without a karma penalty. If I replied to Baughn's +6 comment, however, the outdated karma penalty would still erroneously apply.
Why this comment? Explanation and proof in one: "The answer -- by demonstration -- would take care of that, too.")
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/cambridge-cabs-and-copenhagen-my-route-to-existential-risk/
Author: Huw Price (Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge)
The article is mainly about the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk and the author's speculation about AI (and his association with Jaan Tallinn). Nothing made me really stand up and think "This is something I've never heard on Less Wrong", but it is interesting to see Existential risk and AI getting more mainstream attention, and the author reproduces tabooing in his willful avoidance of attempting to define the term "intelligence".
The comments all miss the point or reproduce cached thoughts with frustrating predictability. I think I find them to be so frustrating because these do not seem to be unintelligent people (by the standards of the internet at least; their comments have good grammar and vocabulary), but they are not really processing.