From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Wed Jun 27 2001 - 23:09:07 MDT
Natasha Vita-More wrote:
>
> At 06:30 PM 6/27/01 -0400, you wrote:
> >"natashavita@earthlink.net" wrote:
> >>
> >> Last night I re-read these dramatic quotes. I saw a movie script ...
> >
> >By all accounts, Hollywood is even worse than The Media. Unless you have
> >beginning-to-end production of the movie by core Extropians, I guarantee
> >it'll be so screwed up as to be worse than nothing.
>
> This is really an exaggeration. You are kidding, aren't you?
Yes, it is an exaggeration, and no, I am not kidding. I fear the concept
of trying to get a Singularity movie produced, something I have heard
proposed on several occasions. Sure, it'd be absolutely wonderful if it
worked, but on the other hand, there does come a point where, you know,
massive clouds of doom and all that.
A Singularity movie would be terribly easy to screw up and a screwup could
easily be far worse than nothing. I fear the scriptwriting and production
process; it is too fragile; there are so many points where it's so easy
for things to go wrong. The process of making a future-changing movie
takes more than a future-changing script. There are so many powerful
people along the way who can screw things up beyond repair just because
they feel like meddling.
Yes, you can write an excellent script for an excellent movie that would
be a tremendous boost to the future. But when you actually send the
script to your agent, what you are doing is placing an enormously powerful
and dramatic plot in the hands of a chain of people at least one of whom
will decide that the AIs should be the bad guys instead.
Look at what happened when A.I. passed from the hands of Stanley "A
Clockwork Orange" Kubrick into the hands of Steven "E.T." Spielberg.
Wouldn't it be ironic if the *original* A.I. script was secretly the
brainchild of Jeremy Rifkin? That could be exactly what happens to us.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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