Re: Singularity and the general public

From: Spudboy100@aol.com
Date: Sat Apr 07 2001 - 04:30:06 MDT


In a message dated 4/6/2001 8:09:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
brian@posthuman.com writes:

<< Actually all this chatting on public mailing lists may not be the best
 thing. I expect as time goes on we may feel the need to retreat even
 farther. This list might become restricted membership, or we might kind
 of disown it and leave it to be a higher level Extropians list. We'll see.
 It's really up to Eliezer of course, but I think he agrees with this? >>

The sense of this statement seems to be, "we (Brian and Eliezer) are moving
to the high beyond". Also, as a technology, something will have to be
produced, tangibly, before one can frighten or awe people with it. That, I
will happily leave to you alphas and betas, while you chaps do what is
deemed, necessary; to promote friendly AI

<<1. Chat with other smart people to see if there are any holes in our work.
   Right now this list helps with that, but as we get more staff this list
   will likely become less relevant to this concern. In latter stages of
   research most likely none of our internal work will be available publicly.

2. Spread the word to other AI developers about Friendly AI, and help them
   integrate it into their designs. Since the AI "community" is relatively
   small we think that once we become a bit more established no more real
   publicity will be required since pretty much everyone should have heard
   of us.>>

These plans of action seem eminently, sensible, as long as you take into
account the notion that it may be upended, perhaps, by a crack, team of AI
tweakers, from Brazil or Bollywood; beating you to the punch. That always is
possible with new inventions, such as Bell's telephone being patented, just a
few hours before some other inventor brought in the same invention.

Kurzweil's taking his concepts to a public forum, as well as Hugo DeGaris's
websites, are actually a decent idea, since all the public may have,
informationally, is Bill Joy, the Kill Joy, making the world safe for
bio-colapse. Joy sort of reminds me of a Citizen Cane billionaire, whining
to the public about how bad technology is, while collecting the fat checks.
Kind of a techno, "let em' eat cake".

Mitch



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:36 MDT