> Robin Hanson wrote: > > > > The fact that people are prone to take these estimate > >questions as attitude surveys is all the more reason to seek concrete > >arguments, rather than yet more attitudes.
What makes you think that concerete arguments can be found for prognostication? Yes, Boeing can give you a concrete argument for wat kind of jet engine it will be building in 10 years (or IBM, about cpu's), but just try predicting the atom bomb in 1895. In 1895, most scientists didn't beleive in atoms, with folks like Rutherford the exception, not the rule. In 1903, H.G. Wells wrote a book predicting the atom bomb (and atomic warfare, and world government). In 1913, Bohr's model of the atom was given legitimacy by Mosley's spectroscopy data. Lise Meitner and Otto Han didn't figure out that the missing mass was just E=mc^2 until the 1930s, and then we had the manhattan project. That's just 50 years from something that didn't exist to in-your-face reality. I doubt that, even now, you could build a "concrete argument" for the possibility of the atomic bomb in 1928. In 1928, the temptation would have been to say either "never, its scientifically impossible", or to say "gosh, maybe, in thousands of years", with the latter only because one had some wishy-washy liberal optimistic view about the forward progress of science. The only concrete argument is this: in 1928, we still needed a few fundamental breakthroughs in physics. Today, its not clear that we need any fundamental breakthroughs at all. There's a fair and widespread beleif that simply doing what we do today, with neural nets and parse trees and reasoning engines, is enough. There seems to be a general consensus that its probably enough to just scale up the CPU cycles a million-fold or a billion-fold, and that will be enough for AGI. That suggests that the only things holding back AGI are Moore's law, and funding for development. That's as close to a "concrete argument" that I get. --linas ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=64233217-4a5849
