[Hplusroadmap] [SL4] Re: Paper: Artificial Intelligence will Kill our Grandchildren

[Dan Bolser]

2008/6/25 Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com>:
> On Friday 13 June 2008, Anthony Berglas wrote:
>> http://berglas.org/Articles/AIKillGrandchildren/AIKillGrandchildren.h

[snip]

>> As worms have evolved into apes, and apes to man, the evolution of
>> man to an AI is just a natural process and something that could be
>> celebrated rather than avoided.  Certainly it would probably only be
>> a matter of a few centuries before modern man destroys the earth,
>> whereas an artificial intelligence may be able to survive for
>> millenia.
>
> Holy shit man, you don't understand evolution. Particularly the part
> about programming and "man evolving into AI". What most people consider
> AI to be is something about programming. I truly doubt that a directed
> intelligent process, like programming, is a naturally occuring
> evolutionary process.

What? In that case please define what is naturally occurring and what
is 'artificial'. Or at least outline how you make the distinction?

In my opinion, all of human activity is a part of the ongoing
biological process that was initiated on the planet approximately 4bn
years ago. The planet was the result of an ongoing biological process
that was initiated about 10bn years ago. Saying something like
'evolution is what animals do' is reducing the scope of your
imagination. Don't cars evolve? Hasn't wheat evolved during the
history of human existence? Isn't GM just the latest phase of that
ongoing co-evolutionary process? Is it 'artificial' that dogs
recognize human emotion better than chimps? Aren't radios self
reproducing concepts / entities in the context of human society?

This thread discusses Darwin and evolution as if they were the same
thing - I don't think this is the case. Just as the movement of the
planets in the sky was described by the ancients, then Euller, then
Kepler, then Newton, then Einstein (and a lot of others that I have
skipped over), the observable phenomenon of evolution can have more
than one explaination / interpretation. Given these broader contexts
within which to understand evolution (neo-darwinism for example),
phenomenon like 'cultural evolution' are very easy to understand as an
extension of the core idea of 'evolution' in general.

There is this whole fascinating branch of linguistics that talks about
how the sum of human knowledge is encoded in our language. Its the
idea that simply the way we talk embodies 1000s of years of progress
in our scientific and cultural understanding of ourselves and the
world around us... corny I know but...

Anyway, sorry for butting in on a couple of threads that I haven't
been following - prolly you discussed all the points that I made above
ad-nausiem elsewhere. I'll look forward to you pointing out all the
100s of documents I should have read before opening my mouth to type.

Dan.