If you read Ray Kurzweil’s books and Hans Moravec’s, what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.
Greg Egan wrote a book recently parodying the SIAI. David Pearce has some very different, but also prettty strange ideas of his own. So, maybe you are picking on dissenters here.
Cool! You posted some material from Ben—but it would be interesting to hear more.
Ben made some critical comments recently. Douglas Hofstadter has long been a naysayer of the whole area:
Greg Egan wrote a book recently parodying the SIAI. David Pearce has some very different, but also prettty strange ideas of his own. So, maybe you are picking on dissenters here.