First, I got a more instrumental response from a 7yo on whether a tooth fairy is real: "As long as I find my dollar under the pillow, she is!"

Second, you were using an adult language with a small child. Asking instead what her friend saw in more detail, and discussing that instead could have been more illuminating. Or not.

Fair question. On this forum narrow AI = not really intelligent and benign, while general AI = potentially smarter than humans, ready to FOOM and dangerous. My point was that Watson might be some day providing an example of a smarter-than-human but benign (not FOOMable) AI, depending on how it is designed.

Probably. We'll have to wait for the production versions. But it does not appear to be just hype.

This blog is very annoying.

To say the least.

They are obviously not interested in providing a forum for unbiased discussions of their ideas. They just want a soapbox for them, nothing more. Which is fine, lots of groups do that. But this should not be confused with rational thought in any way, given how their motivated cognition runs rampant.

If they cared for some semblance of rational discourse, they would have invited a thoughtful charitable critique of their ideas, such as the one from Slate Star Codex, and then discussed it in a thoughtful charitable way. Maybe they will, eventually, who knows, but the chances are slim.

As it stands now, the blog has a long way to go to raise its level of discourse to that of, say, Salon or Fox News.

Not very, but it's already better than humans in several unrelated areas and the list is getting longer. If some day it can behave more human than any single human, would it still be narrow?

Also known as "there are no atheists in foxholes".

Chewing is like sex, you enjoy it more when shared, so leave it for social occasions.

Sigh. Charitable reading is not a strong suit of this place. Not four. How about 100? 1000? Would that be enough?

:)

But isn't it getting too wide too quickly?

Anyway, I am guessing that by your definition the difference between a narrow and a general AI is not the number of problem solving or reasoning tasks where it is as good as or better than humans, even if it's the vast majority of these tasks, but having a "general, flexible learning ability that would let them tackle entirely new domains", i.e. being vastly better than an average single human being, who generally sucks at adapting to "new domains".

I agree with most of what you are saying, however #2 is likely to be mitigated by his not going on a soylent-only diet. Thus there is a fair chance that many subtle overlooked deficiencies in the product will be masked by the "normal" meals he still eats fairly regularly. In your scurvy example, the minimum level of Vit C required (8-10 mg per day) is far lower than what you get from a typical diet (some 10 times that, apparently), so even if he completely removed it from his product, he'd probably get enough of it from his infrequent non-soylent meals. Though his example of forgetting sulfur is a bit worrying and is evidence against this.