[ExI] Did Hugo de Garis leave the field?

[Keith Henson]

On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 1:33 PM, Eugen Leitl <eugen at leitl.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 12:43:24PM -0700, Samantha Atkins wrote:
>>> He sounds like a creationist.
>>>
>> Actually, what was said is exactly correct.  We can't fully spec out an
>> AGI ("traditional blueprint").  It must recursively self-improve.  I
>> thought this was and has been accepted information in these circles for
>> a very long time now.
>
> My beef was with the idea that a more advanced system is
> required to produce a less advanced. This is trivially
> untrue, because darwinian evolution is extremely stupid,
> yet since you can read this message it most assuredly
> does work.

That's because the present NI (natural intelligences) come in two
parts, a hardware that self extracts from the genome, and a knowledge
base/software that gets loaded from past evolutionary accumulations of
culture.  Both are needed.

> I have never believed into recursive self-improvement.
> Nobody is that smart. You just bump up the boundary
> condition, and let emergence handle the rest.

View as a whole, recursive self-improvement is exactly what culture
has been doing since the days when chipping rocks was high tech.

And, yes, the number of people in a culture makes a big difference in
the boundary conditions.

Keith