From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Thu Apr 25 2002 - 16:35:58 MDT
Hal Finney wrote:
>
> Vinge has other technological changes that I found less convincing.
> The biggest was an effective increase in human intelligence due to better
> computer support. He has these junior high kids doing Putman level math
> problems with ease, and learning a programming language in a couple of
> hours that the kid's father spent 3 years learning. Society is turned
> topsy turvy, with competence running inversely with age. The adults
> are helpless compared to these junior high kids, who themselves fear
> the fifth graders.
Sounds reasonable to me...
> I didn't buy it. All the net connectivity and visual systems don't
> clearly add up to the kinds of improved competence Vinge is claiming.
> One of the kids is using some biological boosters but this didn't add
> credibility for me because first, it comes out of nowhere as far as
> grounding in our current scientific knowledge, and second, most of the
> kids didn't use these but they were all expected to master these skills.
By the decade Vinge is talking about, late 2020s CRNS (Current Rate No
Singularity, a measure of linear time), I would expect wearable computer
interfaces to have evolved far beyond the level they occupy today, into an
extended sensorimotor modality. This being the case, the younger kids are
likely to be better adapted to the most recent technology because they began
using it while they had maximum neural plasticity. A fifth-grader beating
an experienced adult with a keyboard is one thing, although it does happen
nowadays; it is far easier to visualize a fifth-grader beating an
experienced adult with a wearable-computing interface that has advanced to
and beyond the level of a Segway Ginger.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 09:13:39 MST