From the final chapter of his new book Cowards, titled "Adapt or Die: The Coming Intelligence Explosion."
... (read 2985 more words →)The year is 1678 and you’ve just arrived in England via a time machine. You take out your new iPhone in front of a group of scientists who have gathered to marvel at your arrival.
“Siri,” you say, addressing the phone’s voice-activated artificial intelligence system, “play me some Beethoven.”
Dunh-Dunh-Dunh-Duuunnnhhh! The famous opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, stored in your music library, play loudly.
“Siri, call my mother.”
Your mother’s face appears on the screen, a Hawaiian beach behind her. “Hi, Mom!” you say. “How many fingers am I holding up?”
“Three,” she correctly answers. “Why haven’t you called more—”
“Thanks,
I think it may be time for Less Wrongers to begin to proactively, consciously ignore this troll. Hard.
I'm afraid I had the same reaction. XiXiDu's post seems to take the "shotgun" approach of listing every thought that popped into XiXiDu's head, without applying much of a filter. It's exhausting to read. Or, as one person I know put it, "XiXiDu says a lot of random shit."
If a book exists in PDF on the web somewhere, I estimate a 90% of chance of finding it by at least one of the following four methods, which altogether take only a few minutes if you're practiced at it:
"All that your brain does when you ask it a question is hit "search" and return the first hit it finds" is saying roughly the same thing that Stanovich and other researchers have said about 'default to Type 1 processing', as explained recently in this post.