On May 28, 2007, at 9:10 PM, Russell Wallace wrote:
On 5/29/07, Samantha Atkins <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Without AI or such IA to be almost the same thing I don't have much
reason to believe humanity will see 3007.
*nods* Or rather - in my opinion - it probably will last that long
either way, but the chance of longer term survival might have been
blown. Civilizations don't last forever, and it's an open question
whether we'll get a second shot if we muff the first one. (To take
one of the simplest subquestions: could industrial civilization be
sustained or repeated with the easily-accessible fossil fuel
deposits used up? I don't know any way to confidently answer that
question in the affirmative.)
So we'd better not blow this first chance.
And you're right that we'll need a lot more intelligence than we
have now, our current hardware and software aren't enough. Given
that an artificial sentient mind, a _replacement_ for the human
mind, isn't feasible this century (even if you don't agree with
that, perhaps you might entertain the idea that it's at least
considerably more difficult than my alternative, and therefore
perhaps we should concentrate our resources on the path that offers
the greater chance of success?), we need therefore to focus on
better, smarter tools to _complement_ the human mind. So while I
call what I'm trying to do AI, you could also call it "such IA to
be almost the same thing".
We are actually in some functional agreement here. My own efforts
(though not so much in the day job currently) will be directed toward
IA via supportive software (some AI flavored, some not) for the time-
being (this side of financial independence or until I run out of IA
ideas I want to explore). However I do believe that AGI is possible
and will change everything when it arrives. Over time I will work
on AGI more directly.
- samantha
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