An interesting discussion / debate with Eliezer Yudkowsky on whether AI will end humanity.  For some, this may be fascinating, frustrating, terrifying, spur more curiosity, I have no idea. I feel like we each tried our best to make our case, even if we got lost in the weeds a few times. There’s definitely food for thought here either way. Also, I screwed up and the chat text ended up being too tiny, sorry about that.

 

EXTRA:

I’m not the best at thinking on the fly, so here are two key points I tried to make that got a little lost in the discussion:

1. I think our entire disagreement rests on Eliezer seeing increasingly refined AI conclusively making the jump to actual intelligence, whereas I do not see that. I only see software that mimics many observable characteristics of intelligence and gets better at it the more it’s refined.

2. My main point of the stuff about real v. fake + biological v. machine evolution was only to say that just because a process shares some characteristics with another one, other emergent properties aren’t necessarily shared also. In many cases, they aren’t. This strikes me as the case for human intelligence v. machine learning.

MY CONCLUSION
By the end, I honestly couldn’t tell if he was making a faith-based argument that increasingly refined AI will lead to true intelligence, despite being unsubstantiated OR if he did substantiate it and I was just too dumb to connect the dots. Maybe some of you can figure it out!