Michael Anissimov, a futurist formerly with the Singularity Institute, writes about artificial intelligence, the singularity, technology predictions, and existential risk.
HN links it on AI and overpopulation. One commenter angrily rejects his overpopulation claim, and others cite his post recommending a productivity blog.
It's fascinating stuff going on there at Numenta.
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People have had huge expectations for so many decades in AI Research that it led to a bad image. But something with that is wrong, because every step towards understanding the brain brought all of us a step forward.
We know Nature is brilliant, so it's absolutely logical that it can't get copied by some funky scientists over the weekend. Could've been the great AI depression, but we'll get over it. I think the entire disappointment spiral led the AI Community to get treated like "wadda wadda wadda".
To me it appears like when a prehistoric human finds laser technology from a crashed UFO and doesn't know what to do with it. Making him disappointed about laser technology. So before whining about how slow we find things out about ourselves, the human brain and the mind we should better invest more in education. The more people can research this topic the faster we get amazing results.
When the research in a topic doesn't yield a promising result it doesn't mean the researchers are incompetent, it means we just don't have enough education or researchers who can complete the puzzle.
Before consuming popular information:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Lasswell
At the time the Numenta stuff got popular, the critics also got a voice: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/04/ben-goertzel-on-numenta/ and…
"Kurzweil has a solid history of predictions going back at least 21 years"
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/01/kurzweils-2009-predictions/
Confirmation bias. You're not looking hard enough at the stuff he says that didn't come true.
Even so, "past performance is no indicator of future success. You could have said the same thing about the goldilocks economy in 2001 but the notion that the economy could continue exponentially forever was pretty dumb. All I have to say about believing in exponential things, is, please, please consider the bacterial growth curve.
http://faculty.irsc.edu/FACULTY/TFischer/images/bacterial%20growth%20curve.jpg
(that's a log graph) See, if you were an intelligent e coli during growth phase, you might notice that everything was exponential and hunky dory, and there was no end in sight.
You raise good points. In fact, that is the very problem of so-called "Friendly" AI. Note the capital F. It's a confusing term, I know, but the basic idea is an AI that "does what we want", in the most general sense. The idea behind FAi is the exact idea you present here.
The point is that it is a bad idea to just throw together an AI and hope that it is friendly (lower case f), but rather the big important problem of our time is to generate a mathematical model of Friendliness, so that we can explicitly define to the AI how we don't want all the bad things you mentioned or any other besides.
[Edit] Here are some relevant links:
http://intelligence.org/files/CEV.pdf
http://commonsenseatheism.com/?p=14047
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2009/08/a-nice-and-meaty-introduction-to-friendly-ai/
The only hard limits for human-style organisms on an earth-type planet are thermodynamic. Using 1970s technology, the earth could support hundreds of billions. e.g.:
http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2006/09/overpopulation-no-problem/
When you look at the simple figures that show that to be true, it somewhat puts the ridiculous debates over billions into context. i.e. they're not really debates over capacity and resources, they're debates over organization and (lack of) understanding the nature of progress and achievement.
Who cares? IQ isn't a good predictor of much, other than performance on other IQ tests. It's true that there are broad correlations between IQ and paths in life[1], but it's not like our greatest contributors to society have been the ones with the highest IQ. I'm just going to laugh at someone someone comes to me and says "You should hire me because I scored at +3 sigma on multiple 'intelligence' tests!".
1. See the graph at http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/?p=321
> Any pointers
The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence http://singinst.org is Yudkowsky's organization.
> How can I assist (other than donating money)?
Donating is good. Here is some writing on 'activism.' http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/writings.htm#techsing
There is also the OpenCog http://opencog.org open-source project sponsored by SIAI.
> Where are the communities?
See these email lists:
http://www.singinst.org/discussion/