From: hook (hookysun@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun Sep 29 2002 - 15:08:03 MDT
From: "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
> Ben Goertzel wrote:
> > There are plenty of potential donors interested in hi-tech stuff out
> > there right now -- people who are "sorta interested" in possibly
> > donating to things like SIAI or Real AI Institute. It's just a little
> > too offbeat and a little too speculative... it might not take that much
> > of A or B to improve the situation significantly...
>
> Well, yes, if you're going after the great mass of people who are "sorta
> interested". But there *are* some people in the world who are capable of
> being more than just "sorta interested". To be honest, Ben, I often get
> the impression that you are "sorta interested" yourself, in which case
> it's understandable that you'd want to work on this level. Going beyond
> "sorta interested" requires being beyond "sorta interested" yourself in
> order to be able to communicate that feeling to others.
The potential donors are interesting; the potential capitalists are not, due to their mundane methods of calculating ROI. Their
idea of high-tech stuff is sl<4. In a way the donors are investors in a higher category, seeming offbeat to the squares who can't
dance to new school beats, seeming overly speculative to those who can't see what's on the horizon.
To Ben the Singularity appears to be icing on the cake (what the cake itself is will remain a mystery, though I suspect it is simply
financial gain).
The thing is Ben doesn't grok seed AI, which is essential to getting anything transhuman within a timeframe to possibly beat
nanotech. His "sort of" interest has a lot to do with this incomprehension.
He doesn't get Friendship Programming esp. structure, which is also essential. Certainly he is not going to have more than casual
interest if he
doesn't see how a whole dish (complex organization around a top-down, rational principle) approach is necessary, i.e.- an a la carte
(altering strictly local properties, goals tacked on as almost an afterthought) approach won't work.
Of course it's plausible that one might get CFAI and Seed AI and why they matter and still have a cursory interest, owing to apathy
or antipathy deeper than I can address here. As for me, I'm only interested in the matter of saving the solar system from total
sterility.
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