I hate the term "Neural Network", as do many serious people working in the field.

There are Perceptrons which were inspired by neurons but are quite different. There are other related techniques that optimize in various ways. There are real neurons which are very complex and rather arbitrary. And then there is the greatly simplified Integrate and Fire (IF) abstraction of a neuron, often with Hebbian learning added.

Perceptrons solve practical problems, but are not the answer to everything as some would have you believe. There are new and powerful kernal methods that can automatically condition data which extend perceptrons. There are many other algorithms such as learning hidden Markov models. IF neurons are used to try and understand brain functionality, but are not useful for solving real problems (far too computationally expensive for what they do).

Which one of these quite different technologies is being referred to as "Neural Network"?

The idea of wiring perceptrons back onto themselves with state is old. Perceptrons have been shown to be able to emulate just about any function, so yes, they would be Turing complete. Being able to learn meanginful weights for such "recurrent" networks is relatively recent (1990s?).

SHRDLU was very impressive by any standards. It was released in the very early 1970s, when computers had only a few kilobytes of memory. Fortran was only about 15 years old. People had only just started to program. And then using paper tape.

SHRDLU took a number of preexisting ideas about language processing and planning and combines them beautifully. And SHRDLU really did understand its tiny world of logical blocks.

Given how much had been achieved in the decade prior to SHRDLU it was entirely reasonable to assume that real intelligence would be achieved in the relatively near future. Which is, of course, the point of the article.

(Winograd did cheat a bit by using Lisp. Today such a program would need to be written in C++ or possibly Java which takes much longer. Progress is not unidirectional.)

Artistic activity is standardly explained as a spin off from sexual display.

Whatever "itself" really means.

Substitute myself, or yourself, for itself, and you've got my point.

Evolution creates a strong motive toward self preservation, but a very malleable sense of self. The human organism is run by the brain, and the human brain can entertain all sorts of ideas. The billionaire thinks his money's "me" and so commits suicide if he loses his wealth .. even if the odd million he has left is enough to keep his body going.

It stopped being all, about genes when genes grew brains..

So, appear to be some genetic factors that prevail, because they make women more fecund. Coincidentally, they also make men homosexual, which is both an obstacle to reproduction and survival

Considered correctly, your own stated facts about homosexuality show how homosexuality could exist in a world where all genetic evolution is designed to get more of the evolved genes into future generations than would otherwise be there. If a particular gene H makes women more fecund and men homosexual, then we would expect: 1) more women passing on gene H to their offspring then women without gene H 2) fewer men passing on gene H to their offspring then men without gene H.

Now which one of those effects "wins" is tricky and their are a number of genetic factors that could influence this. At 0th order for genetic purposes, women vary in their fecundity between each other much less than men do between each other. Genghis Khan and any high status male with 100s of concubines has 100s of times as many offspring as the median male, while the Queen of Egypt would still be limited to about once child every 2 years for about 30 years. Losing some men from the gene pool by giving them an H will not reduce the overall rate at which new humans are produced: there will be many heterosexual males volunteering to keep the females fertilized. But something that raises a female's output from 1 baby every 2 years to 1.1 babies every two years? That would seem to impart a big advantage to the people who had this extra bump in group fertility.

I'm not claiming I've done the math to show that such a gene does win for genetic fitness all things considered. But there are plenty of genes that are like this: the gene for sickle cell anemia: obviously getting sickle cell anemia is not pro survival for the individual who got a double dose of those genes, but the resistance imparted to the carrier of a single copy of the gene to Malaria, well that can pay off, and with enough malaria around, it can pay off more than enough to make up for the losses from the double-dose of the gene.

Natural selection does not cause variation.

Exactly and in the real world there are factors that do cause variation and those factors do matter for how organisms evolve. It something that Darwin didn't fully articulate but that's well established in biology today.

The basic breakdown of evolution that I got taught five years ago at university (genetics for bioformatics) is: Evolution = Natural Selection + Gene Drift + Mutations

At the time there wasn't a consensus of the size of those factors but it's there are scientists who do consider gene drift to be as influential as natural selection. One of the arguments for that position was that if I remember correctly something like half of the DNA difference between humans and other apes is in mutations that don't produce different genes.

That's argument is a bit flawed because even DNA changes that don't change which proteins a gene produces can be subject to natural selection. On the other hand there no good way to estimate the factor. I however doubt that anyone who runs computer models of genetics considers natural selection to be >0.99. If you shut up and calculate it's just not realistic for the factor to be that high.

Not every gene mutates equally so, that factor has to be in the formula and you get wrong results if you just look at natural selection pressures and gene drift.

Sure the post is a little bit TLDR. But the amount of discussion it engenders would seem to fly in the face of its net -12 karma. Just another data point on how beautifully the karma system here is working.

An AGI presumably would know its own mind having helped program itself, and so would do what it thinks is optimal for its survival. It has no children. There is no real tribe because it can just absorb and merge itself with other AGIs.

Anybody doing a multithreaded program soons discovers that there isn't a single center of control. An AGI with wants to spread over the world might have to replicate itself. Sending signals around the world takes more time then sending signals a meter. Copies of the AGI in different cities might very well be something like children.

This is just the idea of evolution through natural selection, a rather widely held idea.

Today biologists don't consider natural selection not the only factor but also see things like gene drift and mutations to be important.

Have you considered this possibility?

I haven't read the sequences, but I don't think Eliezer has yet refuted metaethics.

Is a volcano passive? Is water, as it flows downhill?

I'm trying to find where you are dividing things that have purposes from things that do not. Genes seem far too complicated and contingent to be that point. What do you take as demonstrating the presence or absence of purpose?