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!

I’ll be having a discussion / possible debate with AI expert Eliezer Yudkowsky on May 3rd at 6:10PM UTC at twitch.tv/rossbroadcast. He reached out to me after the last videochat I had where he was mentioned, so we’re going to have a full discussion on AI and possibly the end of humanity. I’ll post it on Youtube afterwards. There will also be a twist to it that I’ll reveal when it starts.

Here’s the April videochat. I finally fixed the framerate! This went on too long, but there were several good questions. Covered a range of topics, but a whole lot was on AI this time.

Freeman Freeman Freeman

Ask questions or topics to discuss here for the next videochat with fans at 5:00pm UTC on April 22nd at twitch.tv/rossbroadcast. Still working on a bunch of stuff; the next Freeman’s Mind should be out before then. Also, the pace on future FM episodes will increase a lot since it fell behind.