As promised, here is the "Q" part of the Less Wrong Video Q&A with Eliezer Yudkowsky.
The Rules
1) One question per comment (to allow voting to carry more information about people's preferences).
2) Try to be as clear and concise as possible. If your question can't be condensed to a few paragraphs, you should probably ask in a separate post. Make sure you have an actual question somewhere in there (you can bold it to make it easier to scan).
3) Eliezer hasn't been subpoenaed. He will simply ignore the questions he doesn't want to answer, even if they somehow received 3^^^3 votes.
4) If you reference certain things that are online in your question, provide a link.
5) This thread will be open to questions and votes for at least 7 days. After that, it is up to Eliezer to decide when the best time to film his answers will be. [Update: Today, November 18, marks the 7th day since this thread was posted. If you haven't already done so, now would be a good time to review the questions and vote for your favorites.]
Suggestions
Don't limit yourself to things that have been mentioned on OB/LW. I expect that this will be the majority of questions, but you shouldn't feel limited to these topics. I've always found that a wide variety of topics makes a Q&A more interesting. If you're uncertain, ask anyway and let the voting sort out the wheat from the chaff.
It's okay to attempt humor (but good luck, it's a tough crowd).
If a discussion breaks out about a question (f.ex. to ask for clarifications) and the original poster decides to modify the question, the top level comment should be updated with the modified question (make it easy to find your question, don't have the latest version buried in a long thread).
Update: Eliezer's video answers to 30 questions from this thread can be found here.
Recursive self-improvement isn't completely well defined and I was only making the point that the learning process for humans involves some element of recursive self improvement. The piano example at this point is no longer entirely useful, because we are just picking and choosing any kind of more specific example to suit our personal opinions. For example, I could reply that you are wrong to contrast the child prodigy with the master pianist, because that confuses the intended comparison between a pianist and a non-pianist. The point of the example is that any experienced pianist can learn new pieces far, far faster than a noob. Since learning new pieces amounts to more knowledge and more experience, more technique, poise, and so on, this process equates to self-improvement. Thus, the experienced pianist has definitely achieved a level of meta-improvement, or improving his ability to improve. However, you could reply that the experienced pianist no longer continues his meta-learning process, (as compared to the prodigy), so therefore the sense of recursive self-improvement has been irrepairably weakened and no longer retains the same level of significance as we are trying to attach to the term. In other words, you might claim that humans don't have the required sense of longevity to their recursive self improvement. In any case, let's return to the main point.
The main point is that humans do recursively self improve, on some level, in some fasion. Why should we expect a formal computer that recursively self improves to reach some greater heights?
I realize that there is somewhat of a problem with my original question in that it is too large in scope, perhaps too fundamental for this kind of small, bullet point type of Q&A. Still, it would be nice if people could maybe give more references or something more serious in order to educate me.
There are many reasons, but here are just a few that should be sufficient: it's much, much easier for a computer program to change its own program (which, having been artificially designed, would be far more modular and self-comprehensible than the human brain and genome, independently of how much easier it is to change bits in memory than synapses in a brain) than i... (read more)