[extropy-chat] The emergence of AI

[Gina Miller]

Was that the "I love you" virus?


Gina "Nanogirl" Miller
Nanotechnology Industries
http://www.nanoindustries.com
Personal: http://www.nanogirl.com/index2.html
Foresight Senior Associate http://www.foresight.org
Nanotechnology Advisor Extropy Institute  http://www.extropy.org
My New Project: Microscope Jewelry
http://www.nanogirl.com/crafts/microjewelry.htm
Email: nanogirl at halcyon.com
"Nanotechnology: Solutions for the future."

  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: Keith Henson 
  To: ExI chat list 
  Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 8:11 PM
  Subject: Re: [extropy-chat] The emergence of AI


  At 08:31 PM 03/12/04 -0500, Eliezer wrote:
  >Hal Finney wrote:

  snip

  >>Are you serious?  30 seconds, once the AI reaches human level?  What on
  >>earth could yet another human-level contributor to the team accomplish
  >>in that time?
  >
  >"Human level" is an idiosyncratic flavor.  I am talking about an AI that 
  >is passing through "roughly humanish breadth of generally applicable 
  >intelligence if not to humanish things".  At this time I expect the AI to 
  >be smack dab in the middle of the hard takeoff, and already writing code 
  >at AI timescales.

  I have a strong emotional inclination to support Hal's view rather than 
  Eliezer's apocalyptic view.

  However . . . .

  About two years ago there was that virus, I forget the name, that infected 
  something like 75,000 vulnerable Microsoft database machines that were 
  connected to the Internet.  Made a mess of the net for a few days till the 
  machines were taken off line and patched.

  But what's important about this episode and possibly provides an 
  instructive real world example for AI timing is that the number of infected 
  machines was later analyzed from the records to have a doubling time of 8.5 
  plus or minus one second.  People just can't react to a threat that comes 
  "out of the blue" this fast.

  If an AI was smart enough to write a virus to take over machines and its 
  intelligence was proportional to "cortical area" (processor cycles) and it 
  "wanted" to get smart fast . . . . .

  :-(

  Keith Henson

  _______________________________________________
  extropy-chat mailing list
  extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
  http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo/extropy-chat
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20041203/fdc07dd7/attachment.html>