[extropy-chat] Singularitarian verses singularity

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

The Avantguardian wrote:
> 
> How can you be so certain of that super-human
> intelligence (artifical or otherwise) is going to be
> the "savior of mankind"? Especially when those people
> who are super intelligent seem incapable effecting the
> necessary changes to "save mankind". Look at Maria Vos
> Savant for example. She has the highest intelligence
> ever quantified and what does she do? She writes a
> column for Parade magazine. If she is happy doing that
> then by all means I won't criticize her choices in
> life but it does kind of make me skeptical that some
> computer is going wake up in somebody's basement one
> day, solve some massive equation, and change the world
> for the better. 

Excerpt from a work in progress:

**

We tend to see individual differences instead of human universals.  Thus 
when someone says the word "intelligence", we think of Einstein, instead 
of humans.

Individual differences of human intelligence have a standard label, 
Spearman's g aka g-factor, a controversial interpretation of the solid 
experimental result that different intelligent tests are highly 
correlated with each other and with real-world outcomes such as lifetime 
income.  Spearman's g is a statistical abstraction from individual 
differences of intelligence between humans, who as a species are far 
more intelligent than lizards.  Spearman's g is abstracted from 
millimeter height differences among a species of giants.

We should not confuse Spearman's g with human general intelligence, our 
capacity to handle a wide range of cognitive tasks incomprehensible to 
other species.  General intelligence is a between-species difference, a 
complex adaptation, and a human universal found in all known cultures. 
There may as yet be no academic consensus on intelligence, but there is 
no doubt about the existence, or the power, of the 
thing-to-be-explained.  There is something about humans that let us set 
our footprints on the Moon.

But the word "intelligence" commonly evokes pictures of the starving 
professor with an IQ of 160 and the billionaire CEO with an IQ of merely 
120.  Indeed there are differences of individual ability apart from 
"book smarts" which contribute to relative success in the human world: 
enthusiasm, social skills, education, musical talent, rationality.  Note 
that each factor listed is cognitive.  And jokes aside, you will not 
find many CEOs, nor yet professors of academia, who are chimpanzees. 
You will not find many acclaimed rationalists, nor artists, nor poets, 
nor leaders, nor engineers, nor skilled networkers, nor martial artists, 
nor musical composers who are mice.  Intelligence is the foundation of 
human power, the strength that fuels our other arts.

The danger of confusing general intelligence with g-factor is that it 
leads to tremendously underestimating the potential impact of Artificial 
Intelligence.  (This applies to underestimating potential good impacts, 
as well as potential bad impacts.)  Even the phrase "transhuman AI" or 
"artificial superintelligence" may still invoke images of 
book-smarts-in-a-box: an AI that's really good at cognitive tasks 
stereotypically associated with "intelligence", like chess or abstract 
mathematics.  But not superhumanly persuasive; or far better than humans 
at predicting and manipulating human social situations; or inhumanly 
creative in formulating long-term strategies.  I am not saying to think 
of Steve Jobs instead of Einstein - that's only the mirror version of 
the error.  The entire range from village idiot to Einstein, or from 
Steve Wozniak to Steve Jobs, fits into a small dot on the range from 
amoeba to human.

If the word "intelligence" evokes Einstein instead of humans (or Steve 
Jobs instead of humans, or Alexander the Great instead of humans) then 
it may sound sensible to say that intelligence is no match for a gun, as 
if guns had grown on trees.  It may sound sensible to say that 
intelligence is no match for money, as if mice used money.  Human beings 
didn't start out with major assets in claws, teeth, armor, or any of the 
other advantages that were the daily currency of other species.  If you 
had looked at humans from the perspective of the rest of the ecosphere, 
there was no hint that the soft pink things would eventually clothe 
themselves in armored tanks.  We didn't win by fighting on other 
species' battlegrounds.  We had our own ideas of what mattered.  Such is 
the power of creativity.

**

> What evidence do I have for this skepticism? I need
> look no farther than this list. We are bunch of really
> intelligent people but are we doing anything to solve
> the problems humanity faces? No, we argue about
> whether Bush is a hero or a fraud and whether the
> color red is the same for everybody or not. Every time
> somebody publishes a press release that they have
> invented a better mouse trap or something, we twitter
> excitedly for a few days, then go back to bickering
> over minutae.

The Extropy list is one of the Singularity Institute's primary sources 
of donors.  This list is where Brian Atkins and Sabine Atkins (then 
Sabine Stoeckel) and I got together and founded SIAI.  If you aren't 
doing anything, that's your own choice.  If you dislike your choice, 
change it!

The Singularity Institute is currently running a $100,000 Challenge 
Grant.  So's Alcor, if that's more to your taste.  From bystander to 
actor is a straightforward transformation, if you're dissatisfied with 
cheering from the sidelines.

I agree that political yammering is a failure mode, which is why the SL4 
list bans political discussion.

-- 
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky                          http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence