From: John Marlow (johnmarrek@yahoo.com)
Date: Fri Jan 12 2001 - 19:49:48 MST
**See below.
--- "Eliezer S. Yudkowsky" <sentience@pobox.com>
wrote:
> John Marlow wrote:
> >
> > I suggest to you that the entire effort to create
> and
> > empower a nanny AI can end ONLY in disaster. The
> thing
> > will have no allegiance to us, no dependence on
> > us
>
> If a human had no dependence on us, s/he would have
> no allegiance to us.
> This, again, is a non sequitur for AIs. An AI has
> allegiance to whatever
> it has allegiance to.
**Uh-huh--what if that doesn't include us?
>
> > --will no more "relate" to us than we do to
> insects
>
> Again, you must realize that the leap from material
> ascendancy to social
> ascendency is one that only makes sense if you
> evolved in a
> hunter-gatherer tribe.
**I suggest that something which did not will be
incapable of relating.
>
> > or, perhaps more appropriately, to the descendants
> of
> > those more primitive life-forms from which many
> > believe we have evolved.
>
> Do you question this theory?
**I refute it. Obviously portions of it are true--as
with the clear line from eohippus or whatever they're
calling it now (hyracotherium?) to modern horses,
early man to present man, etc. Portions of Newtonian
physics were true, or seemed to be, and it accounted
for observable reality. Nevewrtheless it was flawed.
**To suggest that something like Man ("in
apprehension, how like a god") is the result of
anything other than a conscious, directed, intelligent
effort is absurd. Same goes for any other complex life
form or biosphere. If memory serves, Darwin himself
conceded his theory had fatal flaws (the eye, for
example; too complex, too soon); they have not, as
yet, been corrected. And no, I'm not a creationist. I
see the matter as scientifically unresolved. I believe
anyone who can look at the earth and its
passengers--indeed, at the universe itself, right down
to the symmetry, and to the chaos that somehow comes
together--and ascribe it all to random chance...needs
to take another look.
>
> > Tell me--when you turn on the hot-water faucet, do
> you
> > think about the bacteria in the drain being
> scalded to
> > death?
>
> The bacteria didn't write my source code!
**True enough--but their ancestors did. And you feel
no obligation to refrain from killing them--much less
to look after them--because their ancestors wrote your
source code.
This is my point.
john marlow
>
> -- -- -- --
> --
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
> http://singinst.org/
> Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for
> Artificial Intelligence
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