[ExI] Michael Nielsen on Singularity

[Richard Loosemore]

scerir wrote:
> What should a reasonable person believe about the Singularity?
> http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/what-should-a-reasonable-person-believe-about-the-singularity/ 

I posted the following reply to Michael Nielsen's essay:

While I am sympathetic to the conclusion you state at the end, I am 
dismayed by the argument that got you there! The probability range is 
interesting, but not as interesting as the *uncertainty* in the values 
that went into it (Bayesian probabilities help you take account of prior 
probabilities, but they do not insulate you from the folly of putting 
down numbers that are derived from uncertain knowledge). If you were to 
factor in those uncertainties (assuming that you could, because that 
would be a huge task, fraught with difficulties having to do with the 
fundamental nature of probability), you might find that the real range 
was 0.0001% < range < 99% …. in other words, "maybe it will happen, 
maybe it won't".

I am afraid the real story has to do with understanding the nature of 
AGI research, not fiddling with probabilities. Messy. Empirical. 
Definitely something that would get a mathematician's hands dirty (as my 
one-time supervisor, John Taylor, put it when I was first thinking about 
getting into this field).

But in the end, my own take (being up to my eyeballs in the aforesaid 
dirty work) is that the probability is "high" that it will happen "in 
the next 20 years".




Richard Loosemore