I'm starting out as a graphic designer and I'm doing some free work so I can build up a portfolio. I'm doing mostly simple websites which I can compete relatively quickly.
Which brings me to: It sure looks like http://www.annasalamon.com/ could use some refreshing. Any suggestions how I can contact her with this offer?
Which brings me to: It sure looks like http://www.annasalamon.com/ could use some refreshing. Any suggestions how I can contact her with this offer?
The following sites would also benefit from your graphic design skills:
Her email address is given on the 'Interested' page, but I've already passed along your message.
I disagree. It quickly gets across the basic point in a way that doesn't imply too much more than is intended. People are used to qualitatively interpreting qualitative diagrams. I don't think people will read more into this one.
It is not superior strength or perception that led humans to dominate this planet, but superior intelligence.
This is sort of suspect unless you get really specific about intelligence. It wasn't the ability to prove theorems, detect underwater mines, play chess or Jeopardy, do original science, or design artificial intelligences that earned homo sapiens dominance of Earth. It was superior social organization / connection (which depends on intelligence, but a demonstrably different kind).
Now, if you want to ask why Europeans invented progress and dominated much of the world, then you get into the sort of intelligence that helps you prove theorems or do original science. But even then, the social aspect is massively important- capitalism / individualism was probably more important in European dominance than European science (though the two are inherently linked!).
And so if you have a program that self-recursively improves until it is as good as possible at writing programs, there's still no guarantee it'll be good at dominating the world. After all, that's not a coding problem!
Site looks great!
The first sentence is "Here you'll find scholarly material and popular overviews of intelligence explosion and its consequences." which parses badly for me and it isn't clear whether it's supposed to be a title (what this site is about) or just a single-sentence paragraph. I think leaving it out altogether is best.
I agree with the others that the mouse-chimp-Einstein illustration is unsuitable because it's unlikely to communicate clearly to the target audience. I went through the slides of the "The Challenge of Friendly AI" talk but I couldn't find a more suitable illustration.
Maybe the illustration can be "fixed" by simply replacing the Village Idiot and Einstein arrows by a single arrow labeled "human". Then the picture becomes a trivial depiction that humans are closer to chimps in intelligence than to post-intelligence explosion AIs. The more interesting insight (that Einstein and the village idiot have the same log-intelligence) will be gone but you can't really convey that in 4 seconds anyway.
Looks great, but my pedantic design nitpick is that the font on the buttons is hard to read for me because it is narrow.
LW user Lightwave offered to redesign IntelligenceExplosion.com, which at that point looked almost identical to anthropic-principle.com because I don't do web design. Within 9 days of original email contact, Lightwave completed the project and I uploaded the new files. The redesign is a big improvement, so please go to this comment by Lightwave and give him/her lots of karma!