"There is no theoretical barrier to constructing human level AI's, since humans's exist. We can improve human intelligence in various ways (slightly), so we can improve these AI's too (so slightly better than human is possible too). For super-AIs, on the other hand, nothing exists in the world to show that they are possible."
If the "man on the street" has sufficient familiarity with The Wonders of Science to accept human-level AIs as genuinely possible, it seems to me that the sheer boost in simple processing power available to an artif...
People focus on the motivations of the students and the professor because the professor's behavior is unorthodox. The students paid good money to learn about physics. As others have mentioned, you can't be too hard on them, they arrive at class expecting a physics lesson, not sleight-of-hand. Consequently, my initial response to the article was that I understood what EY meant to convey, but I thought there were probably other ways to illustrate it that didn't involve the unnecessary "trickery" demonstrated by the professor.
However, upon further r...
WQ's response was great. I have worked in "the financial system" for nearly 20 years and just in terms of real assets under management, most of the handful of large global firms are each managing assets in the low trillions, and those are "real" assets in the sense that they aren't really anything you could say was being counted more than once due to arcane accounting rules or contractual obligations or whatever.
Back around 2007/2008 there were a few numbers in the mid-tens-of-trillions being tossed around in the news that were guessti...
New to LW... my wife re-ignited my long-dormant interest in AI via Yudkowski's Friendly AI stuff.
Is there a link somewhere to "General Intelligence and Seed AI"? It seems that older content at intelligence.org has gone missing. It actually went missing while my wife was in the middle of reading it online... very frustrating. Friendly AI makes a lot of references to it. Seems important to read it.
I'd prefer a PDF, if somebody knows where to find one.
Thanks!
Eugene McCarthy, Human Origins: Are We Hybrids?