Ben, Thanks for your thoughtful reply.
On 11/5/08, Ben Goertzel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Also, a comment for Ben J: the emerging AGI community and the futurist > community are largely disjoint though there is some minor overlap such as > me.... In general, though, I think balancing openness with > quality-maintenance is actually a hard job once you're in the position of > organizing conferences and journals and such. Personally, having been an > outsider in nearly every social context I've ever been in, my bias is > generally toward openness. Hence, I like others with futurist bent have several differently-slanted presentations, depending upon the audience. To keep from being clobbered by one that is inappropriate for a given audience, I keep such presentations OFF-line and email or privately post them as appropriate. I also found a cute trick to control electronic dissemination. If you search USENET, you will find absolutely NOTHING from me during the past few years. However, if you substitute the "ell" in my last name with a "one", which displays nearly identically on most displays, you can see my activity - which hasn't been all that much lately. You could easily do the same to control accessing to your own work. This has a hilarious side-effect, in that some USENET users have their email clients gather up postings in groups of interest, and then they killfile posters they don't like, to have their postings automatically deleted from their email. Of course, putting my name in their killfile list doesn't work at all. One poor pathetic user kept posting complaint after complaint that he couldn't stop my postings. Eventually, another participant figured it out and explained it to him off-line. Such is the blowback of privacy. Second: I checked http://convergence08.pbwiki.com/Speaker+Sign+Up and your > suggested talk is up there along with everybody else's. Title, but no articles. Anyway, to keep things simple, how about this: if you email me a link to an > external website pertinent to your conference session, I'll just log onto > that wiki and insert it into the box corresponding to your talk. That would > seem to solve the practical problem that you want people to be able to find > out the material about your talk beforehand. Thanks for the offer, but another solution has been presented. Rather than restoring just MY Wiki access, they have decided to open the Wiki up for EVERYONE, as explained in a recent mass-emailer that they sent out late last night (where they have also extended the low-rate signup). That way, they have a way out without ever having to admit that they were wrong. > Finally, an unsolicited piece of advice is that your conference topic from > the wiki Your advice is always appreciated. ************ > > 1. Personal experience with a new procedure to greatly enhance human > intelligence. > > 2. Demo of Dr.Eliza: A new approach to solving society's most difficult > problems. > > 3. Processors that are 10,000 times faster, made on existing silicon fab > lines. > > 4. A scanning UV fluorescence microscope would revolutionize AGI, NN, and > whole brain emulation. > > 5. Technological censorship. It is ubiquitous, even here. It is > an invisible emergent property. > > ************* > > seems like too many different topics for one brief presentation, to me. > Even excepting the fifth topic, it seems like each of the first 4 topics, if > you really have something substantive to say about it, could easily occupy a > whole presentation. > I couldn't agree with you more. It was my hope to post more information, and see what the people who showed up were interested in. Present what was hot, and drop what was not. Note that I posted a note about cognitive enhancement on the Ideas page, and have already received requests for more information from that. One approach might be to give a presentation on Dr. Eliza (I picked that > one up because you say you have a demo) and just hand out brochures on the > other ones to interested parties, including the people at the Dr. Eliza > talk. > Yes. I was planning to have 2-sided handouts for each of these. I was planning to make a brief (20-30 minute) Dr. Eliza presentation, followed by discussing whatever else the audience was interested in discussing. Also, I was considering one more topic and would appreciate your opinion. That topic would be: 5. Can Reverse Reductio ad Absurdum and/or simple AI meet some of the goals of AGI? The point here is that many difficult problems are difficult because human-like conscious thought processes just don't work to solve them, whereas non-intuitive approaches easily within the reach of humans and/or simple programs can work well. Intractable disputes are an obvious case in point. If you want me to paste some modified text up there for you I could do that > too. > Thanks again for the offer. It would be possible for me to pester the people involved about why they > banned you from the wiki and so forth, but I really don't feel like I have > much time to deal with these matters, which aren't strictly my own > business. But you can make use of the above offer of small assistance if > you like. > Thanks yet again for your offer. My feeling that there are real futurists, and then there are people who pretend to be futurists. How do you tell the difference? Just ask them what they are DOING to get there. There is an interesting in-between person who might be used to better position the line between real futurists and pretend futurists, and that is Aubrey de Grey, who will also be at the conference. Watch and listen to him before forming an opinion. Aubrey has published his 7 barriers to longevity, but has done NO real-world wet lab research, seen no patients, helped no elderly people, etc. Here, Aubrey is a pure theorist - a little like me on this AGI forum, and as such, is completely at the mercy of the often erroneous research community who,just like the Computer Science community, has its own assortment of well-fastened blinders on. It appears to me that Aubrey has drawn some well reasoned conclusions from some rather questionable data. At minimum he has propelled various efforts (and possibly stunted others), which almost certainly has some value, regardless of the validity of his conclusions. Steve Richfield ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
