Hello Everyone I have been thinking about uploading for a long time, especially the gradual uploading approach, which I like. But this approach brings up one issue which is the "continuity of the soul" problem. People who opt for a destructive upload would gain a "first-move" advantage over others. So I started to look at the Singularity to see if it offers any solution.
(By the way I have personally convinced myself that uploading is achievable around 20-30 years from now.) I think Eliezer's vision of a single superAI is rather problematic. I think a diversity of specific-purpose AI's is the more likely scenario. The reasons are as follows: 1. The definition of Friendliness is a political issue. There is no such thing as value-free, "objective" morality; the Friendly AI can only *inherit* the moral system of its creators and share-holders (if done right at all!) and the Friendly-AI-as-a-God-like-moral-figure is unsound. The debate about Friendliness will itself start a political war, rather than solve all political problems. 2. One may argue that superAI will be very powerful and everyone would want to be on "our" side. But this also is an unlikely scenario because it does not resolve the problem of *who* will have more power within our "party". Once again this would depend on the definition of Friendliness and thus start a war. (I'm actually quite pacifist by the way =)) 3. Safety. It is better to diversify the risk by building several AIs so in case one goes awry the others (perhaps many others) will be able to suppress it -- fault-tolerance of distributive systems. It seems the best way is to let a whole lot of people augment their intelligence via uploading or *cyborganization*. 4. The superAI is unfathomable (hence unpredictable) to us, so what's the difference between this and other techno-catastrophies? 5. Even if we have FAI, it probably will not stop some people from uploading themselves destructively (They have their rights). This will still create inequality between uploaders and those remaining flesh-and-blood. Therefore the superAI scenario will not happen UNLESS there are some compelling reasons to build it. The fear is that destructive uploading will create too much of a first-move advantage to the effect that everyone would be compelled to follow suit immediately. So the goal should be clear: Create a technology for humans that would allow them to be on-par with uploads. And I think that answer would be: "personal AI". The PAI starts off like a baby and shares the users experience, like a dual existence. By the time cyborganization is available, the cyborganization process would be like merging with one's personal AI. Thus, the rights to transhuman intelligence is distributed to all those who can afford it. If you think about it, that is probably the only sensible way to deal with computational power explosion... ie to create a broadly distributed balance-of-power. It doesn't matter that many people may not be techno-savy enough to use the AI -- that depends on user-friendliness and the best AI should be quite transparent and easy to use. Well, this still sounds very vague and difficult, but it's more plausible than the superAI scenario already (I think). One last problem that remains is poverty. I predict that some people will be maginalized from cyborganization, rather inevitable. Who am I to save humanity? We have to accept this and the next best thing is to maximize availability through education and perhaps redistribution of wealth, creation of more jobs etc. Hope to hear your comments =) Yan King Yin ____________________________________________________________ Get advanced SPAM filtering on Webmail or POP Mail ... Get Lycos Mail! http://login.mail.lycos.com/r/referral?aid=27005 ------- To unsubscribe, change your address, or temporarily deactivate your subscription, please go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/[EMAIL PROTECTED]
