[extropy-chat] Inside Vs. Outside Forecasts

[Eliezer S. Yudkowsky]

Robin Hanson wrote:
> 
> It still seems to me that this group tends to base its forecasts a bit 
> too much on constructing scenarios, and a bit too little on statistics 
> about similar past situations.

It seems to me that there are *no* past situations similar enough to 
permit an outside view.  For an outside view to work, you need data that 
verges on i.i.d. - independent and identically distributed.  *Analogies* 
to past situations are not outside views, and they tend to be chosen 
after the analogizer has already decided what the results ought to be. 
There *is* no outside view of when AI will arrive.   Anyone who tries to 
pin a quantitative prediction on the date is just... plain... screwed.

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