HungryHobo
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The OP is basically the fairly standard basis of american-style libertarianism.
It doesn't particularly "defy consequentialism" any more than listing the primary precepts of utilitarian consequentialist groups defys deontology.
But I don't think the moral intuitions you list are terribly universal.
The closest parallel I can think of is someone listing contemporary american copyright law and listing it's norms as if they're some kind of universally accepted system of morals.
"but you are definitely not allowed to kill one"
Johny thousand livers is of course an exception.
Or put another way, if you say to most people,
"ok, so you're in a scenario a little bit like the films Armageddon or deep impact. Things... (read more)
Yes, our ancestors could not build a nuclear reactor, the australian natives spent 40 thousand years without constructing a bow and arrow. Neither the Australian natives nor anyone else has built a cold fusion reactor. Running half way doesn't mean you've won the race.
Putting ourselves in the category of "entities who can build anything" is like putting yourself in the category "people who've been on the moon" when you've never actually been to the moon but really really want to be an astronaut one day. You might even one day become an astronaut but aspirations don't put you in the category with Armstrong until you actually do the thing.
Your pet... (read more)
Adam and Eve AI's. The pair are designed such that they can automatically generate large numbers of hypothesis, design experiments that could falsify the maximum possible number of hypothesis and then run those experiments in an automated lab.
Rather than being designed to do X with yeast it's basically told "go look at yeast" and then develops hypothesis about yeast and yeast biology and it successfully re-discovered a number of elements of cell biology. Later iterations were given access to databases of already known genetic information and discovered new information about a number of genes .
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2009/04/1st-artificially-intelligent-adam-and-eve-created.html
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16890-robot-scientist-makes-discoveries-without-human-help/
It's a remarkable system and could be extremely useful for scientists in many sectors but it's a... (read more)
It's pretty common for groups of people to band together around confused beliefs.
Millions of people have incorrect beliefs about vaccines, millions more are part of new age groups which have embraced confused and wrong beliefs about quantum physics (often related to utterly misunderstanding the term "Observer" as used in physics) and millions more have banded together around incorrect beliefs about biology. Are you smarter than all of those people combined? Are you smarter than every single individual in those groups? probably not but...
The man who replaced me on the commission said, “That book was approved by sixty-five engineers at the Such-and-such Aircraft Company!”
... (read more)I didn’t doubt that the company had some
This again feels like one of those things that creeps the second anyone points you to examples.
If someone points to an AI that can generate scientific hypothesis, design novel experiments to attempt to falsify them and run those experiments in ways that could be applied to chemistry, cancer research and cryonics you'd just declare that those weren't different enough domains because they're all science and then demand that it also be able to control pianist robots and scuba dive and run a nail salon.
Nothing to see here everyone.
This is just yet another boring iteration of the forever shifting goalposts of AI .
First: If I propose that humans can sing any possible song or that humans are universal jumpers and can jump any height the weight is not upon everyone else to prove that humans cannot because I'm the one making the absurd proposition.
he proposes that humans are universal constructors, able to build anything. Observation: there are some things humans as they currently are cannot construct, as we currently are we cannot actually arbitrarily order atoms any way we like to perform any task we like. The worlds smartest human can no more build a von neuman probe right now than the worlds smartest border collie.
he merely makes the guess that we'll... (read more)
This argument seems chosen to make it utterly unfalsifiable.
If someone provides examples of animal X solving novel problems in creative ways you can just say "that's just the 'some flexibility' bit"
You're describing what's known as General game playing.
you program an AI which will play a set of games, you don't know what the rules of the games will be. Build an AI which can accept a set of rules for a game then teach itself to play.
This is in fact a field in AI.
also note recent news that AlphaGoZero has been converted to AlphaZero which can handle other games and rapidly taught itself how to play Chess,Shogi, and Go (beating it's ancestor AlphaGoZero) hinting that they're generalising it very successfully.
...ok so I don't get to find the arguments out unless I buy a copy of the book?
right... looking at a pirated copy of the book, the phrase "universal knowledge creator" appears nowhere in it nor "knowledge creator"
But lets have a read of the chapter "Artificial Creativity"
big long spiel about ELIZA being crap. Same generic qualia arguments as ever.
One minor gem in there for which the author deserves to be commended:
"I have settled on a simple test for judging claims, including Dennett’s, to have explained the nature of consciousness (or any other computational task): if you can’t program it, you haven’t understood it"
...
Claim that genetic algorithms and similar... (read more)
perhaps a more real-life simple medical-model example:
If a student is short-sighted, society could accommodate them to make it not-a-disability by employing someone to sit with shortsighted students to take notes for them, employing someone to dictate all material too far away for them to see, providing a navigator so they don't need to read distant signs....
Or society could just expect them to wear glasses or get lasik.
Society seems to fall so far on the side of the latter that it seems like pure medical-model.