davidad has a 10-min talk out on a proposal about which he says: “the first time I’ve seen a concrete plan that might work to get human uploads before 2040, maybe even faster, given unlimited funding”.
I think the talk is a good watch, but the dialogue below is pretty readable even if you haven't seen it. I'm also putting some summary notes from the talk in the Appendix of this dialoge.
I think of the promise of the talk as follows. It might seem that to make the future go well, we have to either make general AI progress slower, or make alignment progress differentially faster. However, uploading seems to offer a third... (read 7438 more words →)
I did a calculation here:
http://tinyurl.com/3rgjrl
and concluded that I would start to believe there was something to the universe-destroying scenario after about 30 clear, uncorrelated mishaps (even when taking a certain probability of foul play into account).
I like Roko's suggestion that we should look at how many doomsayers actually predicted a danger (and how early). We should also look at how many dangers occurred with no prediction at all (the Cameroon lake eruptions come to mind).
Overall, the human error rate is pretty high: http://panko.shidler.hawaii.edu/HumanErr/ Getting the error rate under 0.5% per statement/action seems very unlikely, unless one deliberately puts it into a system that forces several iterations of checking and correction (Panko's data suggests that error checking typically finds about 80% of the errors). For scientific papers/arguments one bad per thousand is probably conservative (My friend Mikael claimed the number of erroneous maths papers are far less than this... (read more)
People have apparently argued for a 300 to 30,000 years storage limit due to free radicals due to cosmic rays, but the uncertainty is pretty big. Cosmic rays and background radiation are likely not as much a problem as carbon-14 and potassium-40 atoms anyway, not to mention the freezing damage. http://www.cryonics.org/1chapter2.html has a bit of discussion of this. The quick way of estimating the damage is to assume it is time compressed, so that the accumulated yearly dose is given as an acute dose.
"If intelligence is an ability to act in the world, if it refer to some external reality, and if this reality is almost infinitely malleable, then intelligence cannot be purely innate or genetic."
This misses the No Free Lunch theorems, which state that there is no learning system that outperforms any other in general. Yes, full human intelligence, AI superintelligence, earthworms and selecting actions at random are just as good. The trick is "in general", since that covers an infinity of patternless possible worlds. Worlds with (to us) learnable and understandable patterns is a minuscule minority.
Clearly intelligence needs input from an external world. But it has been shaped by millions of years of... (read more)
In think the "death gives meaning to life" meme is a great example of "standard wisdom". It is apparently paradoxical (right form to be "deep"), it provides a comfortable consolation for a nasty situation. But I have seldom seen any deep defense for it in the bioethical literature. Even people who strongly support it and ought to work very hard to demonstrate to fellow philosophers that it is a true statement seem to be content to just rattle it off as self-evident (or that people not feeling it in their guts are simply superficial).
Being a hopeless empiricist I would like to check whether people today feel life being less meaningful than a... (read more)
A new report (Steven B. Giddings and Michelangelo M. Mangano, Astrophysical implications of hypothetical stable TeV-scale black holes, arXiv:0806.3381 ) does a much better job at dealing with the black hole risk than the old "report" Eliezer rightly slammed. It doesn't rely on Hawking radiation (but has a pretty nice section showing why it is very likely) but instead calculates how well black holes can be captured by planets, white dwarves and neutron stars (based on AFAIK well-understood physics, besides the multidimensional gravity one has to assume in order to get the threat in the first place). The derivation does not assume that Eddington luminosity slows accretion and does a good job... (read more)
If this is not a hoax or she does a Leary, we will have her around for a long time. Maybe one day she will even grow up. But seriously, I think Eli is right. In a way, given that I consider cryonics likely to be worthwhile, she has demonstrated that she might be more mature than I am.
To get back to the topic of this blog, cryonics and cognitive biases is a fine subject. There is a lot of biases to go around here, on all sides.
I think Kaj has a good point. In a current paper I'm discussing the Fermi paradox and the possibility of self-replicating interstellar killing machines. Should I mention Saberhagen's berserkers? In this case my choice was pretty easy, since beyond the basic concept his novels don't contain that much of actual relevance to my paper, so I just credit him with the concept and move on.
The example of Metamorphosis of Prime Intellect seems deeper, since it would be a example of something that can be described entirely theoretically but becomes more vivid and clearly understandable in the light of a fictional example. But I suspect the problem here is the vividness: it would... (read more)
Another reason people overvalue science fiction is the availability bias due to the authors who got things right. Jules Verne had a fairly accurate time for going from the Earth to the Moon, Clarke predicted/invented geostationary satelites, John Brunner predicted computer worms. But of course this leaves out all space pirates using slide rules for astrogation (while their robots serve rum), rays from unknown parts of the electromagnetic spectrum and gravity-shielding cavorite. There is a vast number of quite erroneous predictions.
I have collected a list of sf stories involving cognition enhancement. They are all over the place in terms of plausibility, and I was honestly surprised by how little useful ideas of... (read more)
I have played with the idea of writing a "wisdom generator" program for a long time. A lot of "wise" statements seem to follow a small set of formulaic rules, and it would not be too hard to make a program that randomly generated wise sayings. A typical rule is to create a paradox ("Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty") or just use a nice chiasm or reversal ("The heart of a fool is in his mouth, but the mouth of the wise man is in his heart"). This seems to fit in with your theory: the structure given by the form is enough to trigger recognition that a wise saying will now arrive. If the conclusion is weird or unfamiliar, so much the better.
Currently reading Raymond Smullyan's The Tao is Silent, and I'm struck by how much less wise taoism seems when it is clearly explained.