From: hal@finney.org
Date: Tue Mar 14 2000 - 23:46:27 MST
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky, <sentience@pobox.com>, writes:
> I understand the instinct to look for cheaters in a social situation,
> but it seems to me that there's not much I can do about that. If I
> wrote an AI tomorrow and it proved the Goldbach Conjecture on Thursday,
> someone would still say I was a poseur. Unless writing an AI is going
> to actually advance the state of the art - which, unaided, would
> probably take a huge chunk of full-time work, and I can't do that unless
> I get paid - then it's just an ego trip. _Coding a Transhuman AI_ isn't
> working code, no, but the people *I'm* interested in can generally
> perceive that it's different enough to be worth trying, and that's the
> prerequisite for getting far enough to try.
Are there people who are knowledgeable about AI, who have worked in the
field and attempted to build AI systems, who have given you feedback
or evaluations on your ideas? Is that a direction you have attempted
to pursue?
If you really think your ideas are good, you should enter the fray and
expose them to the sharpest and most experienced minds available. Have
you considered presenting your ideas at an AI conference? Perhaps that
would be a better investment of your time than attending a Singularity
conference. Getting into the academic conference circuit, getting your
paper published in the proceedings so it can be cited as something other
than a URL, is a good first step in science as it is practiced today.
In cryptography, there are thousands of people who make up ciphers but
are frustrated because they can't attract the experts' attention to
see if they are any good. But if a cipher gets presented at one of the
conferences, the top names are on it like sharks. I suspect that the
same thing would be true in other fields.
Hal
P.S. and of course there's always comp.ai as a starting point.
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