3 and 4: hardware, sure—that is improving too—just not as fast, sometimes. A machine may find a way to obtain a credit card—or it will get a human to buy whatever it needs—as happens in companies today.
6: how much time? Surely a better example would be: “perform experiments”—and experiments that caan’t be minaturised and executed at high speeds—such as those done in the LHC.
7: AltaVista didn’t protect us from Google—nor did Friendster protect against MySpace. However, so far Google has mostly successfully crushed its rivals.
8: no way, IMO—e.g. see Matt Ridley. That is probably good advice for all DOOMsters, actually.
Some of the most obvious safeguards are likely to be self-imposed ones:
Phew! First, my material on the topic:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_singularity_is_nonsense/
http://alife.co.uk/essays/the_intelligence_explosion_is_happening_now/
Then a few points—which I may add to later.
3 and 4: hardware, sure—that is improving too—just not as fast, sometimes. A machine may find a way to obtain a credit card—or it will get a human to buy whatever it needs—as happens in companies today.
6: how much time? Surely a better example would be: “perform experiments”—and experiments that caan’t be minaturised and executed at high speeds—such as those done in the LHC.
7: AltaVista didn’t protect us from Google—nor did Friendster protect against MySpace. However, so far Google has mostly successfully crushed its rivals.
8: no way, IMO—e.g. see Matt Ridley. That is probably good advice for all DOOMsters, actually.
Some of the most obvious safeguards are likely to be self-imposed ones:
http://alife.co.uk/essays/stopping_superintelligence/
...though a resiliant infrastructure would help too. We see rogue agents (botnets) “eating” the internet today—and it is not very much fun!
Incidentally, a much better place for this kind of comment on this site would be:
http://lesswrong.com/lw/wf/hard_takeoff/