Re: JOIN: Joshua Fox

From: Peter de Blanc (peter.deblanc@verizon.net)
Date: Mon Feb 06 2006 - 15:01:23 MST


On Mon, 2006-02-06 at 22:59 +0200, Joshua Fox wrote:
> Socialist theory of the late 19th Century and Singularity theory of
> the
> early 21st both believe that inevitable forces of history take the
> world
> through successively more evolved phases, which must inevitably
> culminate--within a few decades of the time of the theorizing--in an
> ultimate Utopian phase. Nineteenth Century Socialist philosophers
> honestly thought they had a firm _scientific_ basis, and they were
> wrong. How can we be sure that we are different?

Hi, Josh.

Singularity theory does not predict that the forces of history will
inevitably lead the world to a utopia. It does predict that certain
types of mind can very rapidly self-improve, such that previously
difficult tasks become trivial. This is discussed in part III of LOGI,
which you can read here:

http://www.intelligence.org/LOGI/

Whether a recursively self-improving mind would create a utopia depends
on the mind in question; utopia is certainly not the default scenario.
One of the important SL4 ideas is that unfriendly AI is the default.
CFAI should really say this in big flashing red letters somewhere, but a
pretty good explanation can be found here:

http://www.sl4.org/archive/0012/0355.html



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