[ExI] Whistling past the graveyard

[Anders Sandberg]

On 2016-04-06 12:04, Dan TheBookMan wrote:
> Was this prediction based on anything more than gut feel?

Those predictions were all gut feel.

It is well known (among forecasting experts) that experts on a domain 
rarely make good forecasts about the domain - it is a different kind of 
expertise.

> Also, isn't progress often nonlinear and perhaps many of the 
> predictions are linear? My guess is in this field more rapid advances 
> are happening now where past progress was more fits and starts.

Fits and starts are less predictable than exponential growth, although 
people of course do tend to underestimate that because of linear 
predictions (or the availability heuristic).

The big problem IMHO is the lack of ways of measuring progress in most 
AI domains. We have nice results for speech recognition, character 
recognition and image captioning, but far less good measurements on 
actual smarts.

Shane Legg's AIQ ( http://www.vetta.org/2011/11/aiq/ ) seems to be 
fairly hard to apply, even if it is general (and the only serious 
application so far of the BrainFuck language!).

-- 
Anders Sandberg
Future of Humanity Institute
Oxford Martin School
Oxford University

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