[extropy-chat] The emergence of AI

[Robin Hanson]

At 07:03 PM 12/4/2004, Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>Robin Hanson wrote:
>>Virtually no established experts in related fields (i.e., economic 
>>growth, artificial intelligence, ...)
>
>What a coincidence, that economics is so closely related to Artificial 
>General Intelligence recursive self-improvement trajectories.  Amazingly 
>enough, just about every person who contacts me seems to have specialized 
>in a field that lets them make pronouncements about matters of AGI.

Economic growth is the fully recursive self-improvement of the world 
economy as a whole.

>It would seem that Artificial Intelligence is an even easier art to 
>acquire than managing a government, writing legislation, or maintaining 
>international diplomatic relations.  I take it you've never run into 
>people who think that their own field of knowledge easily generalizes to 
>making pronouncements on specific questions in economics?

I did spend nine years doing Artificial Intelligence research (at Lockheed 
and NASA).

>As for seed AI, recursively self-improving AI, I am not aware of anyone 
>who explicitly claims to *specialize* in that except me and Jurgen 
>Schmidhuber.

Even if true, the usual procedure is to engage the recognized experts in 
the most closely related pre-existing fields available, to convince them to 
recognize you as experts in your new field.  If you disagree with my 
judgement about what the most closely related fields are, well fine, pick 
some others.  Saying that nothing else is at all related won't fly.





Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323