and the author reproduces tabooing in his willful avoidance of attempting to define the term "intelligence".
Whatever the author's motivations, that definition is unnecessary in the present context. As Chalmers noted (sect. 3), the key premises in the argument for the singularity can be formulated without relying on the concept of intelligence. What is needed is instead the notion of a self-amplifying capacity, coupled with the claims that (1) we can create systems that exhibit that capacity to a greater degree than we do and that (2) increases in that capacity will be correlated with changes in some property or properties that we care about.
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.