You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

ChristianKl comments on Mathematics and saving lives - Less Wrong Discussion

2 Post author: NancyLebovitz 19 April 2014 01:32PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (15)

Comments (15)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: ChristianKl 19 April 2014 10:56:34PM 1 point [-]

When working on crypto I'm not sure whether you are more likely to kill people by breaking an encryption algorithm or rescue people by fixing something.

Certainly Godel didn't think of saving lives when working out his [in]completeness theorems.

I don't see how he did safe lives by working on them. Could you explain?

Comment author: shminux 20 April 2014 07:45:09AM 0 points [-]

He hasn't yet, but if you believe that MIRI will eventually save humans from UFAI, and given that some of the basic work they do relies on his results, one can make a case for Godel inadvertently helping to save lives.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit