From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Mar 27 2001 - 19:47:03 MST
"Robert J. Bradbury" wrote:
>
> On Mon, 26 Mar 2001, Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> > Physicists can build nuclear weapons but they can't
> > build better physicists.
>
> However, if the physicists are approaching a complete TOE, or at
> least a sufficiently robust TOE that they can't take it any
> further without recreating a big bang, then even the very
> best cognitive science will not be able to build better
> physicists. Fundamentally physics is about reducing things
> to a set of simple principles. Once that has been done
> it becomes useless to try an extract any more from an empty
> well.
As someone else commented, that's a big honkin' "IF" you got there. But
leaving that aside, of course it's still possible to build better
physicists. You can build a physicist so good that ve *could* have gone
from "Things fall down" to General Relativity in only a thousand
subjective seconds. If *that* physicist then says you're done, you really
*know* you're done.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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