Re: [Fwd: Eliezer speaks (forwardable)] - was loserhood and analysis

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From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Aug 17 2000 - 14:54:27 PDT

Jeff Bone wrote:
>
> Well, one thing can be certain about the entity called CaTAI X: it
> will almost certainly have well-formed substructs called "ego" and
> "hubris." And there's *nothing wrong with that.*

Ego and hubris are complex functional adaptations representing millions
of years of evolution, neither of which will spontaneously appear in an
AI's source code any more than freshly baked pizzas will start growing
on palm trees next Tuesday.

I approve of both ego and hubris when it comes to humans. In this job,
it is necessary to go beyond that. I see no reason to design in either
deliberately and every reason NOT to do so. Neither instinct
contributes materially to intelligence in a way that couldn't be
duplicated, and far less indiscriminately and dangerously, with a few
consciously considered heuristics; heuristics that could be applied in
appropriate contexts, without overgeneralization.

Jeff Bone wrote:
>
> PS - Eliezer: Kurzweil's book "The Age of Intelligent Machines* was
> published in 1990, nine years before "...Spiritual..." If you
> started writing about this stuff "two years before [Spiritual,]"
> then Kurzweil still got the jump on you by at least 7 years.

I have not, in fact, read Kurzweil. I've perused a few paragraphs.
Maybe my Shock Level is just too high, but there wasn't anything in
there that struck me as new - so I didn't read any further. If
_Spiritual_ (or _Intelligent_) has introduced other people to
transhumanism; well, it hasn't introduced me - so why should I tip hat?
He's certainly not one of my Progenitors in the same sense as Vernor
Vinge, Douglas Hofstadter or Eric Drexler - whom I do tip hat to, and
frequently.

Strata Rose Chalup wrote:
>
> I still have strong reservations about the the desirability of the
> end-goal, as well as the methods, but I no longer believe that the folks
> in charge are running a backyard nitroglycerin lab and using hammers for
> QA.

That's all I ask. 

-- 
        sentience@pobox.com    Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
               http://singinst.org/home.html

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