From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sun Jun 10 2001 - 14:31:17 MDT
John Clark wrote:
>
> Eliezer S. Yudkowsky <sentience@pobox.com> Wrote:
>
> >the headline should really be: "IBM announces 1% improvement in
> >chip technology; science leaps ahead seven months"
>
> How about "The Singularity Will Occur Seven Months Early".
Not really. The point is that this is the *expected*, *normal* rate of
progress, i.e., this discovery or "something just like it" was already
taken into account, as "Moore's Law", in predicting what the hardware will
look like while the AI-builders labor.
I'm not dissing *IBM*, I'm dissing the *press release* for being very
mildly out of perspective. I also agree that IBM's accumulated history of
improvements like these makes for a pretty impressive CV.
It's a pity Intel didn't post a press release "Intel announces
experimental 1000% improvement in clock speeds" next to IBM's "IBM
announces 37% improvement in clock speeds"; *that* would have put things
permanently in perspective for an entire crop of headline-readers...
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:08:03 MST