Eliezer Yudkowsky on the Singularity, Bayesian Brains and Closet Goblins
I am heavily biased as I was active on Overcoming Bias (Irony?) and then later the Less Wrong forums, but every interaction I have had over the years with Yudkowski or his followers has been insufferable.<p>Beyond just the pathos of that, I take major issue with the lack of technical depth of MIRI and the rest of these &quot;futurist&quot; prognosticating semi-doomsayers with respect to current AI state of the art, or even proposals for actual roadmaps to AGI.<p>Their Step 1: Create AGI; Step 2: ??; Step 3: Doomsday reasoning chain has led to what is in my mind the silly concept that AGI can be built to be &quot;safe&quot; to humanity. This leads to false hope and to things like the AI Safety Pledge aka &quot;Research Priorities for Robust and Beneficial Artificial Intelligence&quot;[1] - for which admittedly I am a signatory largely cause my research adviser did and it was the thing to do at the time.<p>That said, I thought his response to how he differs from Kurzweil - moreso the conclusions he comes to - are pretty spot on.<p>[1] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;futureoflife.org&#x2F;ai-open-letter&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;futureoflife.org&#x2F;ai-open-letter&#x2F;</a>