@ EY: I feel a bit awful about saying this, because it feels like I’m telling philosophers that their life’s work has been a waste of time
Well, your buddy Robin Hanson has proved mathematically that my life has been a waste of time in his Doctors kill series of posts. I accept the numbers. Screw the philosophers; now it’s their turn. It’s all chemical neurotransmitters. Next: the lawyers.
EY: email me. I have a donor in mind.
EY:Give me $5 million/year to spend on 10 promising researchers and 10 promising students, and maybe $5 million/year to spend on outside projects that might help, and then go away. If you’re lucky we’ll be ready to start coding in less than a decade.”
I am contacting the SIAI today to see whether they have some role I can play. If my math is correct, you need $100 million dollars, and 20 selected individuals. If the money became available, do you have the individuals in mind? Would they do it?
I’ll be 72 in 10 years when the coding starts; how long will that take? Altruism be damned, remember my favorite quote: “I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it through not dying. (W. Allen)
Disclaimer: perhaps the long-standing members of this blog understand the following question and may consider it impertinent. Sincerely, I am just confused (as I think anyone going to the Singularity site would be).
When I visit this page describing the “team” at the Singularity Institute, it states that Ben Goertzel is the “Director of Research”, and Eliezer Yudkowsky is the “Research Fellow”. EY states (above); “I was not working with Ben on AI, then or now.” What actually goes on at SIAI?
@EY: If I have words to emit that I don’t necessarily mean, for the sake of provoking reactions, I put them into a dialogue, short story, or parable—I don’t say them in my own voice.
That’s what I meant when I wrote: “By making his posts quirky and difficult to understand”. Sorry. Should have been more precise.
@HA: perhaps you know the parties far better than I. I’m still looking.
Jess Riedel,
I don’t know Eliezer Yudkowsky, but I have lots of spare time, and I have laboriously read his works for the past few months. I don’t think much gets past him, within his knowledge base, and I don’t think he cares about the significance of blog opinions, except as they illustrate predictable responses to certain stimuli. By making his posts quirky and difficult to understand, he weeds out the readers who are more comfortable at Roissy in DC, leaving him with study subjects of greater value to his project. His posts don’t ask for suggestions; they teach, seeking clues to the best methods for communicating core data. Some are specifically aimed at producing controversy, especially in particular readers. Some are intentionally in conflict with his previously stated positions, to observe the response. The comparison I’ve previously made is that of Jane Goodall trying to understand chimps by observing their behavior and their reactions to stimuli, and to challenges requiring innovation, but even better because EY is more than an pure observer: he manipulates the environment to suit his interest. We’ll see the results in the FAI, one day, I hope. If rudeness is part of that, right on.
@quasi-anonymous; This is exactly the kind of BS conflict that Eliezer is searching for in this blog, in order to help with his catalogue of human characteristics. Congratulations. Unfortunately, you won’t get any extra pay when the FAI emerges.
Ever notice how heated and personal the discussion gets when one person tries to explain to a third person what the second person said, especially with such complicated topics? Perhaps this should be a green button that the AI never pushes.
Thanks, Tim Tyler, for the insight. I am trying to learn how to think differently (more effectively), since my education and profession actually did not include any courses, or even any experience, in clear thinking, sad to say. As you can see from some of my previous comments, I don’t always see the rationale of your thoughts, to the point of discarding some of them out of hand, e.g., your series of observations on this topic, in which you dismiss possibly the best-referenced work on the diet subject without reading it, because you felt that some of the author’s previous work was inadequate, yet your own references were lame.
I know there is a strong bias on this board about the arrogance of doctors, especially given their rather well-documented failure to make a positive impact on overall health care in the USA. I abhor the “doctor arrogance” as well. Any arrogance seen in my posts is unintentional, and comes not from being a “arrogant doctor”, but from the failing of being an “arrogant person”, a quality that seems widespread in many of the OB commenters. The more I learn about how such “ninja-brained” people think, the less I have to be arrogant about. I’m here to learn.
I know nothing about math, and cannot even follow what’s being argued (keep this in mind when programming the fAI), but it’s really funny to see how one of the 2 guys that got the right answer is on this like white on rice. Is that part of the experiment?
@Tim Tyler:IMO, few would lose much sleep over the rabbit slaughter: humans value other humans far more than we value rabbits.
PETA? Vegans?
@Mario: I believe in the moon because I can see the moon, I trust my eyes, and everyone else seems to agree.
This is so far from true that jokes are made about it: One evening, two blondes in Oklahoma, planing to spend their vacations in Florida, are having cocktails and gazing at the moon. The first asks, “Which do you think is closer, the moon or Florida?” The second responds, “Helloooo. Can you see Florida?”
@J Thomas: Eliezer is now presenting us with a series of arguments that are all bias, all the time, and noticing how we buy into it.
A heartfelt thanks. As a late-comer, I was unaware of the technique, and too lame to notice it on my own. Me perspective has changed. Is there any way to delete old comments, or is that similar to the desire to upload more intelligence?
One should not go through an entire lifetime (soon to be infinite?) without reading something by Harry Crews, my ninth-grade English teacher. Regarding Robert Bruce Thompson’s quote in the main post: “The simple fact is that non-violent means do not work against Evil.” Mr. Crews position: “Contrary to popular belief, I’m not a violent person. But if you wrong me, I’ll kill your fucking ass, and I’ll spend the rest of my life in jail. I’ll kill your fucking ass and you can count on it; depend on it.”
This is the species after which EY is trying to pattern fAI. Thank (God, goodness, whatever) that the Bush opponents to advances in science are unlikely to see this post, which is the dumbest I have yet come across on OB, and which confirms that EY is just a person, like the rest of us.
I was led to this post and thread by the recent comment list. Not having read the series before (apparently along with Mr. McCloskey, whose Keats quote is the opening feature used by Mr. Yudkowsky in the post two days prior), I find it elegant. Strangely missing, as far as I can tell, is any reference to Richard Dawkins’ book, Unweaving the Rainbow, a beautifully written treatise on the joy of knowledge for its own sake.
DJB: Dr. Hanson’s post today, mundane dishonesty, seems to beg the question in your scenario, “What if he’s lying about how hungry he is?” There could be numerous explanations for this: power, more sex (sorry; I guess those two are the same), insurance against famine, assurance of the competition’s demise, et al. In medicine, we have all sorts of tests, whether or not Dr. Hanson accepts that their interpretation leads to any meaningful intervention on health issues, to determine the status of one’s nutritional state. As far as I know, we have no tests to determine the level of hunger. Is that what I see being called a “meta” issue? I can begin to see why the programming of an fAI has not been accomplished yet. Keep working, please.
It would seem that the big development in our lifetimes has been the advent of the digital computer, the Turing Machine. Assuming all humans come into the world with no basic knowledge other than hard-wired reflexes, we must all gain our knowledge from those who have have preceded us, along with our own reflections about that knowledge and reflections on our environmental observations. The entire Library of Congress is available digitally. Using the concepts of trend analysis and Bayesian Probabilities (and others I don’t know about), couldn’t a properly programed computer available right now analyze all human knowledge to this point, spotting trends, successful patterns, outcomes that improve the human condition, etc? Couldn’t it then use that knowledge to predict the future trends that would be beneficial? Isn’t that what Eliezer and others are trying to do, albeit in a much more awkward way? I think the computer would discover the importance of Bayesian Probability, if it is important, forthwith. If it is not recursively self-improving, it could at least approach the ideas that Eliezer and others are trying to describe for FAI in a much faster and more efficient way. N’est pas?
“When two opposite points of view are expressed with equal intensity, the truth does not necessarily lie exactly halfway between them. It is possible for one side to be simply wrong.”—Richard Dawkins