Re: How hard a Singularity?

From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jun 22 2002 - 14:03:50 MDT


Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
> >
> > By hypothesis, the AI just made the leap to human-equivalent smartness.
> > We know from evolutionary experience that this is a highly significant
> > threshold that opens up a lot of doors. Self-improvement should be going
> > sixty at this point.
>
> Eliezer, I think you are mistaken about this. The shift from chimpanzee
> to human was probably nothing like the shift from infrahuman to
> human-equivalent AI will be. The two development trajectories are too
> different to draw analogies between them. In particular, the sudden
> invention of "general intelligence" supported on chimpanzee substrate
> may have no analogue in the development path of an AI.

Conceded, Eliezer. However, I still think that jumping to
"human-equivalent" smartness should be worth something in opened doors - in
terms of which parts of the system are self-understandable if nothing else.
  (I.e., the AI was designed by humans, therefore human smartness is a
significant internal threshold.) But I could be mistaken, and at any rate
you are correct that we know nothing "from evolutionary experience".

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://intelligence.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence


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