From: Joshua Fox (joshua@joshuafox.com)
Date: Fri Mar 16 2007 - 01:48:13 MDT
Standard apology: Please point me to URLs if this has already been
addressed, as I suspect it has.
Why do Singularitarians focus so much on biases and heuristics? The
"Overcoming Bias" blog has several leading Singularitarians.
Some possible answers:
a. The human brain is the only General Intelligence we have, so we want to
imitate it in our AGI design, but we want to avoid the flaws which evolution
has built in, in particular since these biases often underlie the morally
worst aspects of humanity.
b. The biases (AKA heuristics) represent efficient short-cuts to decisions,
and so we may want to use them in our AGI.
c. Like any visible design quirks, the biases give an excellent hook for
reverse-engineering of the human mind (particularly when they are _not_
adaptive).
d. (F)AGI researchers, just like anyone else, should strive to be good
rationalists, and all the more so considering the earth-shaking significance
of their efforts. They can best do this by eliminating the biases in their
own thought.
None of these seems like a reason to make anti-bias into a #1 priority. I
wonder why there is such a correlation between Singularitarianism and an
interest in bias.
Joshua
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