[Ian] You mean Mark Germine (I interacted with him at the time and blogged) ?
[Krimel] Right, as I recall he got trashed as being SOM and/or left because he was looking for people to join something. [Ian] PS was Jurgen Schmidhuber at the event you attended ? [Krimel] I don't think so but the full list of speakers is available at: www.hplussummit.com. Everything was video recorded and in fact streamed live at the time. I believe it wil all be available online but I don't know exactly when that will happen. In the mean time they appear to be sending out a "live" stream which you can watch, you just can't choose what to watch. You can just see whatever happens to be streaming ATM. [Ian] My point ... Are you talking about machine intelligence overtaking humans ? or Are you talking about machine intelligence plus human intellect overtaking humans ? [Krimel] I take Kurzweils basic point to be that humans will develop AIs that will help them develop smarter AIs. That has already happened BTW. Eventually AIs get to be smart enough to develop smarter AIs without help or AI+. Those AIs can then develop geometrically smarter and smarter AI++s. That is the "singularity" as I understand it. [Ian] I remain sceptical about the former happening until AGI evolves through replication and social organization. The latter I just see as natural human evolution. [Krimel] Unless you read replication and social organization into the above I don't see any need and if that is what you mean by replication and social organization is seems like a pretty useless metaphor. But I do take the whole idea of Humanity+ and transhumanism to be a kind of extension of evolution without the slow speed and randomness. Rather than waiting around for hundreds of thousands of years for something interesting to happen humans will design their own genetic future. That certainly is evolution but it is hardly natural selection. Just a couple of side notes here. I had never heard of transhumanism before last week and while I find it interesting I have not thought about it long enough to have any real commitment to it beyond my initial investment of $150 for a two day event. Still, I forget who did it but, the knee jerk reaction here of writing it all off as SOM was pretty predictable. If there was a shared metaphysics in any of this I would say it was the underlying assumptions of information theory. I recently read and plan to reread a book by Luciano Floridi call "Information". It is part of the Oxford University Press Very Short Introduction series. Which means it is very short but not really for dummies. In it he outlines a philosophy of information which I think covers a lot of ground that Pirsig touched on and pointed towards but could not see clearly. A shame really. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org/md/archives.html
