RE: No Singularity?

hal@finney.org
Mon, 15 Nov 1999 10:28:26 -0800

Billy Brown, <bbrown@transcient.com>, writes, regarding www.geniebusters.org:
> It's mostly an argument against the nano-Santa Claus viewpoint, which few of
> us support in the first place. Those of us who expect the nanotech
> revolution to look more like the computer revolution (i.e. fast exponential
> improvements, but not an instant achievement of Nirvana) find nothing at all
> persuasive there.

In fairness though we do have many people here and in nanotech circles who expect a much faster transformation. See Eliezer's recent posts about his Singularity Institute, for example. So it is quite appropriate for critics such as Lyle to address such claims.

> There was some argument about this on the list about a year ago, which you
> may be able to find in the archives. I'd also suggest viewing the
> geniebusters site through http://www.critlink.org, since several people have
> posted commentary on it using CritLink.

A correction, the URL is http://crit.org. You can get to Geniebusters via Crit directly via http://crit.org/http://www.geniebusters.org. I agree that this is a useful way to access the site, although I suspect that the author is unaware of these annotations and hence not in a position to respond.

Hal