[ExI] Did Hugo de Garis leave the field?

[Kelly Anderson]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2011 at 8:00 PM, Samantha Atkins <sjatkins at mac.com> wrote:
> Well, ok, partially.   To assume that even an AGI will not be smart enough
> to self-improve on purpose seems like a stretch.
>
> Surely evolution is not the only way to get to improvements.

There seems to be a philosophical position on the part of some that
you can't design intelligence that is more intelligent than yourself.
I think that is just a ridiculous position. Just having an
intelligence with the same structure as ours, but on a better
substrate, or larger than a physical skull would result in higher
intelligence rather trivially. Add a computer type memory without the
fuzziness of human memory and you would get better processing. I have
never understood the argument that the brain is insufficiently bright
to understand itself, since we work in groups... it just confuses me
that anyone would take this position. It seems like saying one person
could never design a mission to land men on the moon. That may be
true, but it is also entirely irrelevant to whether we can accomplish
it as a species.

-Kelly