Who are you? Would you like to introduce yourself to the rest of us? Perhaps tell us about what brings you here, or what interests you.

‘We can also say, with greater confidence than for the AI path, that the emulation path will not succeed in the near future (within the next fifteen years, say) because we know that several challenging precursor technologies have not yet been developed. By contrast, it seems likely that somebody could in principle sit down and code a seed AI on an ordinary present-day personal computer; and it is conceivable - though unlikely - that somebody somewhere will get the right insight for how to do this in the near future.’ - Bostrom (p36)

Why is it more plausible that a person can sit down and invent a human-level artificial intelligence than that they can sit down and invent the technical means to produce brain emulations?

To be clear, you are saying that a thing will seem frivolous if it does have a relevant franchise, but hasn't happened in real life?

Some other technological topics that hadn't happened in real life when people became concerned about them:

• Nuclear weapons, had The World Set Free, though I'm not sure how well known it was (may have been seen as frivolous by most at first - I'm not sure, but by the time there were serious projects to build them I think not)
• Extreme effects from climate change, e.g. massive sea level rise, freezing of Northern Europe, no particular popular culture franchise (not very frivolous)
• Recombinant DNA technology, the public's concern was somewhat motivated by The Andromeda Strain) (not frivolous I think).

Evidence seems mixed.

It seems to me that if we're going to be formalizing the idea of the relative "moral importance" of various courses of action to different moral theories, we'll end up having to use something like utility functions. It's unfortunate, then, that deontological rules (which are pretty common) can't be specified with finite utility functions because of the timelessness issue (i.e., a deontologist who doesn't lie won't lie even if doing so would prevent them from being forced to tell ten lies in the future).

War is taken fairly seriously in reporting, though there are a wide variety of war-related movies in different styles.

Was there anything in particular in this week's reading that you would like to learn more about, or think more about?

I think an important fact for understanding the landscape of opinions on AI, is that AI is often taken as a frivolous topic, much like aliens or mind control.

Two questions:

1) Why is this?

2) How should we take it as evidence? For instance, if a certain topic doesn't feel serious, how likely is it to really be low value? Under what circumstances should I ignore the feeling that something is silly?

Apologies; I didn't mean to imply that the economics related arguments here were central to Bostrom's larger argument (he explicitly says they are not) - merely to lay them out, for what they are worth.

Though it may not be central to Bostrom's case for AI risk, I do think economics is a good source of evidence about these things, and economic history is good to be familiar with for assessing such arguments.

Eh, not especially. IIRC, scores have also had to be renormalized on Stanford-Binet and Weschler tests over the years. That said, I'd bet it has some effect, but I'd be much more willing to bet on less malnutrition, less beating / early head injury, and better public health allowing better development during childhood and adolescence.

That said, I'm very interested in any data that points to other causes behind the Flynn Effect, so if you have any to post don't hesitate.

I would bet heavily on the accumulation. National average IQ has been going up by about 3 points per decade for quite a few decades, so there have definitely been times when Koko's score might have been above average. Now, I'm more inclined to say that this doesn't mean great things for the IQ test overall, but I put enough trust in it to say that it's not differences in intelligence that prevented the gorillas from reaching the prominence of humans. It might have slowed them down, but given this data it shouldn't have kept them pre-Stone-Age.

Given that the most unique aspect of humans relative to other species seems to be the use of language to pass down knowledge, I don't know what else it really could be. What other major things do we have going for us that other animals don't?