Regarding Kurzweil's claim of the added neocortex mass in humans resulting in a qualitative leap of human abilities, and also that there are levels of abstraction in the neurons. It seems strange to me because 1) humans have had the same brain for tens of thousands of years, yet the brain was completely reliant on per chance technological discoveries. Additional neurons enable addition complexity in signaling, but the signaling comes from the environment, and so it seems to me humans may have just gotten lucky with their environment, especially with things...
This is important because more robots could provide the economic growth needed to solve many urgent problems
Isn't the problem that you can't have economic growth with robots? Robots don't get paid and don't participate in the circular economy. You need a whole bunch of new people that have a salary that will spend money to pay for all the robots. Which apparently we don't have.
The map is not the territory in terms of AI
Since AIs will be mapping entities like humans, it is interesting to ponder how they will scientifically verify facts vs fiction. You could imagine a religious AI that read a lot of religious texts and then wants to meet or find god, or maybe replace god or something else. To learn that this is not possible, it would need instruments and real-time data from the world to build a realistic world model, but even then, it might not be enough to dissuade it from believing in religion. In fact I'd say there are millions... (read more)