Sustainability of Human Progress

[Anatoly_Vorobey]

John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP and one of the founders of the study of AI, died earlier this week. McCarthy was actually the person who came up with the phrase “Artificial Intelligence”, in 1955. I find it likely that one day, not very soon, the first thinking self-aware machines will study their history and honor McCarthy’s memory.

Sustainability of Human Progress is a set of pages jmc worked on mainly in the late 90s and early 2000s, I think, though he continued to update them occasionally later. This work isn’t as widely known as it ought to be. It may be of interest to the LW crowd, even though McCarthy’s underlying assumptions of how the human progress will proceed differ from those popular here.

“He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.”—John McCarthy

[Kaj_Sotala]

A summary of the pages would make people more likely to click on them (and upvote this post). Beware trivial inconveniences.

[Anatoly_Vorobey]

I should have considered that (but didn’t). Thanks!

[khafra]

I find it likely that one day, not very soon, the first thinking self-aware machines will study their history and honor McCarthy’s memory.

Apropos

[lessdazed]

honor McCarthy’s memory

I doubt it.

McCarthy’s underlying assumptions of how the human progress will proceed differ from those popular here.

Can you elaborate? What assumptions?

[Anatoly_Vorobey]

McCarthy investigates the energy needs of the human civilization in the next hundreds and thousands of years (sometimes going up to millions of years) under the tacit conservative assumption that the basic structure of the civilization and its needs will remain largely the same, only increasing in quantity. Someone who is convinced that, for example, the humanity is bound to go through a singularity event in the next 100-300 years may find much of his reasoning irrelevant.

[jhuffman]

Until 1999 I was rather neutral about the danger of global warming. Recently I have moved towards the skeptical side, seeing as so many scientists have been refusing to be stampeded by the politicians. Fred Singer has been a long time skeptic, and here is his tally of some fellow skeptics. He’s not alone.

[Jayson_Virissimo]

Anatoly_Vorobey, thanks for this. I have updated my opinion of John McCarthy upwards and have been introduced to information concerning several topics that I am deeply interested in. Just saying, I got more value from this than a single upvote can express.

[Shmi]

Or, a bit less succinct,

Many questions can be settled by recourse to available statistics and arithmetic—arithmetic not higher mathematics, although higher mathematics is also useful. The converse is that failing to look up statistics and do the arithmetic is a recipe for ignorance.

Or as a Bayesian might put it, use statistics to set up your priors and then the arithmetic of the Bayesian theorem to update on them.