RE: human augmentation, putting it into perspective

From: Ben Houston (ben@exocortex.org)
Date: Sat Jul 28 2001 - 18:07:50 MDT


>> Ben Goertzel wrote:
>> >What I'm imagining is someone, in 1850 or so, saying
>> >"Bird augmentation is much more promising than airplane
>> construction. The
>> >starting point is way ahead of where airplane constructors are
starting."
>>
>> You should have stated a goal in order to qualify what was mean by "more
>> promising." Without stating a how you are comparing the viability of one
>> solution to another your conclusions are somewhat vacuous.
>
>Sorry, I thought that was implicit. The goal of my imaginary commentator
>from 1850 is human flight -- boosting people up in the air, and moving them
>around a while once they're up there. The goal could be quantified further
>but you probably get it onw ;)

I am being too terse in some of my emails, sorry.

I understood the metaphor and the implied mapping of the metaphor to your
point. It was the underlying point that I was disagreeing with. The point
was, as I understood it, that artificial-AI/seed-AI was a better that
augmenting humans based on some criteria. I was suggesting that the
criteria (i.e. "the goal"/"more promising") on which you based this judgment
were ill defined/not defined and thus your conclusion was not supportable
and thus the analogy was "somewhat vacuous".

Anyways, one of my longer term goals (and probably one of the harder ones to
realize) is to make people smarter - thus I favor human cognitive
augmentation. ;-) What's your goal? How are you comparing one path to the
other?

Also one has to look at the environment in which all this research is taking
place. I figure that human cognitive augmentation is going to be somewhat
part or an offshoot of the very well funding medical field. More
specifically it will be an offshoot of the field of cognitive
neuroscience/cognitive science/neuroscience - a somewhat large and active
set of fields. I do not see as much support being AI thus even if they
problems to be solved in each field are comparable I suggest that the one
with more researchers and funding (i.e. the one society is more motivated
towards) is going to make more progress. I do not believe that cognitive
prosthetics is a end to itself, much of it will be for helping those who are
physically or mentally disabled in some way. I also feel that the possible
benefits to society are enormous and difficult to question where as the
benefits of a SysOp or a total replacement for human intelligence are
somewhat less so.

>> I would not risk trying
>> to predict which would be more successful in the medium (ie.
>> couple decades)
>> or long term (ie. centuries) - I do not value my intellect so highly. I
>> suspect that in the medium and long-term what we view as alternatives may
>> become less distinct from each other and thus this argument may be moot.
>
>I'm sure what you're saying is true in the LONG term, but I disagree about
>the medium term.
>
>We still don't have airplanes that flap their wings, or a complete
>understanding of how bees fly, and it's a long time since the Wright
>Brothers. In another 1000 years, though, we'll likely have both.

Are you reasoning with an analogy in order to disagree with my conclusions
on the seed-AI vs. human augmentation? If so I disagree (and you should
state it more explicitly because I am having problems with the reverse
mapping of argument statements from analogy to target) or maybe I am just
misunderstanding you now.

Cheers,
-ben houston
http://www.exocortex.org/~ben

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-sl4@sysopmind.com [mailto:owner-sl4@sysopmind.com]On Behalf Of
Ben Goertzel
Sent: Saturday, July 28, 2001 5:11 PM
To: sl4@sysopmind.com
Subject: RE: human augmentation, putting it into perspective

> Ben Goertzel wrote:
> >What I'm imagining is someone, in 1850 or so, saying
> >"Bird augmentation is much more promising than airplane
> construction. The
> >starting point is way ahead of where airplane constructors are starting."
>
> You should have stated a goal in order to qualify what was mean by "more
> promising." Without stating a how you are comparing the viability of one
> solution to another your conclusions are somewhat vacuous.

Sorry, I thought that was implicit. The goal of my imaginary commentator
from 1850 is human flight -- boosting people up in the air, and moving them
around a while once they're up there. The goal could be quantified further
but you probably get it onw ;)

It could be done by genetically modifying eagles until they're big enough to
carry people, but that's not the approach that's worked best so far.

> I would not risk trying
> to predict which would be more successful in the medium (ie.
> couple decades)
> or long term (ie. centuries) - I do not value my intellect so highly. I
> suspect that in the medium and long-term what we view as alternatives may
> become less distinct from each other and thus this argument may be moot.

I'm sure what you're saying is true in the LONG term, but I disagree about
the medium term.

We still don't have airplanes that flap their wings, or a complete
understanding of how bees fly, and it's a long time since the Wright
Brothers. In another 1000 years, though, we'll likely have both.

-- Ben G



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