From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jul 10 2002 - 04:27:14 MDT
Anders Sandberg wrote:
>
> The scary part is that the mainstream is catching up with us in many
> respects. I would say that there is not a vast difference between our
> current transhumanist concepts and the ones we had in 93 - sure, in
> some fields quite a bit refinement and plenty of neologisms, but very
> few fundamentally new transhumanist ideas. Meanwhile the mainstream
> has more and more adopted ideas of nanotech, cryonics (yes, although
> most mock it they know the concept), biotech, AI and so on.
Well, sure, if you hang out where you are instead of running ahead full
speed, you're going to fall behind. Futuristic communities are always
expanding and giving birth to new, closer-to-the-frontier communities
inside, in a process that seems to have a good deal of empirical
regularity, if not quite on the same order as Moore's Law. I would
argue that Singularitarianism is considerably different, and yes, more
advanced, than transhumanism in '93 or '96. And the process goes on.
The argument predicting a hard takeoff today is advanced far beyond what
it was in, say, 1997. There's a concrete, nonanthropomorphic model for
Friendly AI. And an interesting fellow by the name of Michael Anissimov
recently accused me of peddling a whitewashed, politically correct
version of the Singularity.
You've always got to head to the frontiers, and you can't assume that
the frontier ten years ago is still the frontier today. Maybe
Singularitarianism itself will be superseded in a few years; it's hard
for me to imagine Singularitarianism superseded by anything short of the
Singularity itself, but the universe doesn't care what I can't imagine.
-- Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/ Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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