From: Damien Broderick (thespike@satx.rr.com)
Date: Sat Apr 29 2006 - 11:27:02 MDT
At 12:17 PM 4/29/2006 -0400, Richard wrote:
>Or, looking at it a different way, if someone had managed to
>complete a superintelligent AGI on, say, January 1st 1670, just
>after Newton discovered the laws of motion, ALL of the scientific
>progress that has happened between then and now would have been
>finished by January 2nd (assuming that we conservatively restrict
>the self-improvement potential to a factor one billion).
This ignores the (apparently) crucial element of empirical testing
and feedback into pure ratiocination. I bracket "apparently" because
it's not yet demonstrable that several million years of armchair
thinking can't project superstrings and quasars from the 17th century
empirical database, but that restriction seems to me highly likely.
Damien Broderick
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