[ExI] The End of the Future

Dennis May dennislmay at yahoo.com
Tue Oct 4 15:04:14 UTC 2011


Anders Sandberg wrote:
 
"...keynote talk was by Hubert Dreyfus and largely consisted 
of him gloating about how he had been right about the 
failures of all the AI pioneers"
 
Everyone took short-cut routes instead of developing and
implementing large scale neural networks - no mystery
there.  Unfortunately I still don't see any serious long term
effort in that direction - just larger and larger short-cuts
with no plans for follow-on except more and more short
term projects.
 
Anders Sandberg wrote:
 
"I think this shows a general malaise of many fields: are 
there incentives for progress or incentives for churn?"

Anders lists a number of observations of symptoms of
a problem.  The root of the problem is not hard to 
understand - it is central planning versus free markets.
Central planners represent a serial computer with a number
of bottlenecks in speed and a limited number of inputs
[limited knowledge].  Free markets are a massive parallel
computational project with nearly unlimited inputs and
outputs.  You can build remarkable serial and/or partially 
parallel computers [Watson] and conclude their successes 
imply a path forward [seen versus unseen].  Or you can
learn from history and what works in nature and unleash
the much greater potential of what amounts to a massive
parallel operation in essentially neural network form 
[much greater knowledge] - free markets.

I would think that people in a forum like this would
understand information bottlenecks and serial versus
parallel processing and be able to apply it in economic
and political situations.

Big government and central planners may be able to
pull off a moon shot and build atomic bombs but the
science [Goddard] and [Szilárd] was the work of a
tiny number of individuals.  In the days of 6%-8%
real growth unleashed by free markets there would
have been real money available in free markets to
invest in new technologies versus government 
siphoning it all off to buy votes [seen versus unseen].
Money in private hands can and did build huge
projects in the past - something central planners 
would have us believe cannot be done today.

Dennis May
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