From: Lyle Burkhead (lybrhed@earthlink.net)
Date: Sun Apr 04 1999 - 21:24:17 MDT
On your web site, you say
> The ultimate object, remember, is for runaway positive feedback
> to take over and give birth to something transhuman
In general I agree with that, except
(1) It doesn't have to be "runaway" -- it will proceed at its own pace,
whatever that is.
(2) I think in terms of IA instead of AI. The seed is within us. I am
creating an environment around myself that fosters a positive feedback
mechanism in my own mind (and body), which will lead to something --
"transhuman," maybe, although I'm increasingly uncomfortable with such
words. I just think of it as clear thought and perfect health.
I also have other aims, such as wiping hip-hop off the face of the earth,
but I don't imagine Extropians could relate to that.
You and I have such different vocabularies that it would take a very long
time to establish communication. I don't get my philosophical vocabulary
from Hofstadter and Vinge. I thought you would understand my reference to
the ur-meme immediately. Do you understand how Judaism works as a meme?
Have you read Everett Fox's translation of the Torah? or Aryeh Kaplan's
translation of Sefer Yetzirah? or Isaiah, in any translation? or "The Art
of Biblical Poetry" by Robert Alter? I guess you don't think that sort of
thing is worth bothering with. Not to mention Frege, Wittgenstein, Austin,
Goedel (his own papers, not filtered through GEB), Rene Thom, and all the
other stuff I read. I read a lot of math -- not Hofstadter's
self-reflective stuff, but plain old math. And plain old science -- I
subscribe to Nature and read it every week; it would never occur to me to
subscribe to a science fiction magazine, or to make science fiction the
center of my thought. And plain old history, and plain old fiction and
poetry (Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare, Keats, Goethe, Rilke, etc). We have
both read Dawkins, but the "meme" meme by itself is not enough to establish
a common ground for discussion of ultimate goals and how to get there.
Nevertheless there is a deep resonance here. As I read your web site, I get
an eerie sense of deja vu. I feel like I am reading my own notebooks from a
decade ago. At that time I still believed in AI. I wanted to create a new
kind of entity, not exactly a religion, not exactly a business, not exactly
a school, but a combination of all three -- a network of schools and
businesses that would make money not for its own sake but with the aim of
creating the Singularity. (I actually used that word for a while, after
going to a Terence McKenna seminar at Esalen in 1988). The whole thing was
going to be organized as a corporation called Recursive Systems. For
various reasons nothing ever came of this. I guess the main obstacle was
that I was uncomfortable with the messianic pretensions involved.
There are three ways to get people to write checks:
1. Define your project as research in computer science, with potential
military applications. Explain it in terms that make sense to agencies such
as NSF and DOD (or their equivalents in some other country).
2. Define your project as a business. Break it down into steps, in such a
way that each step is profitable in its own right. Do the same thing with
your AI system that Stephen Wolfram did with Mathematica, or John Walker
did with AutoCad, or Bill Gates did with MS-DOS. It is still possible to
start from scratch and make billions of dollars in the software industry.
Someone will have the same dominant position in robotic software that Bill
Gates has in PC software. (This is what I meant the other day when I said
you wouldn't have to worry about money if you spent your time writing
software instead of reading the list.)
3. Define your project in religious terms, in such a way that people care
about it and want to see it happen. Call it Singularitarianism, or some
such ism. Or just say you are going to create the Messiah, or be the
Messiah. A lot of people will believe this and write checks, if you have
the stomach for it. It is still possible to make money with cults. I see
living proof of this every day -- I live across the street (diagonally)
from the Scientology Celebrity Center. The money pours in. There are also a
lot of preachers making a ton of money off the coming Apocalypse. But I
don't think anybody has pursued this from a specifically Jewish angle. A
lot of Jews here in Los Angeles (and elsewhere) expect the Messiah to
appear any day. The opportunity is there, for whoever wants it. I don't. If
the first one didn't come back to life after they crucified him, I don't
imagine my prospects would be any better.
I think path #2 is the wisest choice.
I'm not going to be writing checks for the Elisson Project, because, as I
explained in geniebusters, I think the whole thing is based on a fallacy.
To say that computing power is doubling every n years is at most a
half-truth. The number of transistors on a chip is doubling, and the clock
speed is doubling, but that doesn't imply that intelligence is doubling. It
doesn't imply that there is going to be a Singularity. It wouldn't surprise
me if, a decade from now, you write something like geniebusters, in which
you describe how it gradually (or perhaps suddenly) dawned on you that you
plus the software you create will always understand philosophy better than
the software by itself. It should be an interesting paper -- maybe better
than geniebusters, which is certainly not the last word on the subject.
Lyle
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