From: James Higgins (jameshiggins@earthlink.net)
Date: Fri Apr 06 2001 - 08:59:04 MDT
At 02:43 AM 4/6/2001 -0400, Brian Atkins wrote:
>James Higgins wrote:
> > We are playing with incredibly dangerous technology here. Not once have I
> > seen the powers that be on this list stop and ask "should we do this?" You
>
>Oh yeah, that old thing. We did that like 2 or 3 years ago. Sorry if it
>seems rather old hat, and unthinking by this point. Do you really think
>we would go to the trouble of forming SIAI, and do the things we are doing
>if we weren't already convinced that we should do it? We have considered
>all possible futures that we have come across or dreamed up, and this one
>is the one that looks the best, and has the best chances of being achieve-
>able. I guess if you really want to debate this again we do it, but we
>pretty much demand you first go locate the previous discussions in the
>Extropians archive and read up. There was also a thread on the FoRK list
>last year when some other newbies took umbrage. It also may be mentioned
>in Friendly AI, but the current version has grown so much in size I haven't
>tried to read it yet. There are even discussions of this in the SL4 archive-
>see: http://www.sysopmind.com/archive-sl4/0009/
That 'old thing' is the most important point you need to make. Instead of
directing people off to read things scattered all over the web, you need to
write something. It may not be as fun to write as FAI, and you may
consider it a waste of time, but something like this should be your highest
priority, I think. You need a definitive reference for these types of
questions. BTW, you'll note that I personally don't question IF we should
pursue the singularity. But I do question HOW. I'm not convinced that
your approach is the best one. If you've really spent the last 2-3 years
proving this to yourself, then you should tell us about it. Write up a
paper explaining all this thinking you've done and why, exactly, your
approach is the right one. But you still need to cover why we should be
doing this at all, for those out there that are not yet convinced of that
point (which by far outnumber those of us who are).
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:36 MDT