[ExI] stealth singularity

Fri May 17 00:32:56 UTC 2019

From: extropy-chat <extropy-chat-bounces at lists.extropy.org> On Behalf Of John Clark
Sent: Thursday, May 16, 2019 4:32 PM
To: ExI chat list <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org>
Subject: Re: [ExI] stealth singularity

On Thu, May 16, 2019 at 2:52 PM William Flynn Wallace <foozler83 at gmail.com <mailto:foozler83 at gmail.com> > wrote:

 >> If we can define exactly what is intelligence, it is no longer intelligence.  spike

> Have to query you again - no one is ever going to define any abstract concept to the point where all people accept it, and furthermore, accept the means by which to test it.  I really don't know how to respond to your quote above but it bothers me - seems self-contradictory.  bill w

Ah ...William... Spike can correct me if I'm wrong but I believe he was satirizing the anti-AI position.

 John K Clark

John you have been reading my nonsense for a lotta years, so you know my style.  I have always treated ExI as a big frat party rather than a scientific forum.  You have grown accustomed to my posting silly stuff such as how to make big profit in the event of the zombie apocalypse (…hey that’s an idea…)   Now of course when I attempt snarky but subtle satire, everyone is waiting for the pie in the face joke, and they miss the derisive humor aimed at the AI community in general, with their incessant goal post moving.  It has gotten so crazy they don’t even bother burying the goal posts anymore.  They leave it on the truck.  Soon as the other team comes into view, they crank it up and haul it out farther.

In the chess world, the Goal Post Moving Company never sleeps.  It was taken to such an extreme, the flat refusal to acknowledge software AI, the community would sooner admit that humans are stupid than allow that software is smart.

OK then.  We have such a deep-seated prejudice, that “intelligence” must be, just HASTA be, something mysterious, unexplainable, some kind of biological magic, we collectively refuse to recognize intelligence when we see it.

Well, OK what is the alternative?  Here it is: we recognize that if we dig deep enough and go down all the way to the molecular level, intelligence is understandable by intelligence, that it really isn’t magic, that everything we do, everything we create, think, feel, everything any bio-computer does, can be duplicated in a software simulation running on a silicon-based processor.

This position is neither claiming that machines can be intelligent or that humans are not.  It is only that the one can be made to work a lot like the other, and that the terms themselves are only as meaningful as the meanings we attach to them.

spike

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