Today's post, Heading Toward Morality was originally published on 20 June 2008. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
A description of the last several months of sequence posts, that identifies the topic that Eliezer actually wants to explain: morality.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was LA-602 vs RHIC Review, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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You've implemented a neural network (rather simple) and made it to self-organize to recognize rabbits. It was self-organized following outside sensory input (this is only one way direction of information flow, another direction would be sending controlling impulses to network output, so that those impulses would affect what kind of input the network receives).
OK.
Now, suppose I want a term that isn't quite so specific to a particular technology, a particular technique, a particular style of problem solving. That is, suppose I want a term that refers to a large class of techniques for causing my computer to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, including but not limited to recognizing rabbits.
If I'm understanding you correctly, you reject the phrase "I program the computer to perform various cognitive tasks" but might endorse "I made the computer self-organize to perform various cognitive tasks."
Have I understood you correctly?