From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Mon Apr 29 2002 - 18:39:25 MDT
Hal Finney wrote:
>
> There was supposed to be a debate this past weekend at the Foresight
> conference between Greg Stock and Ray Kurzweil about whether biological
> or machine technology would be more important in the major changes ahead.
> I was not present, but it seems to me that Kurzweil has the stronger
> argument, that machine technology will continue to advance much faster
> than biology can.
You would have thought so. However, Ray Kurzweil ended up arguing that
humans and machines would be integrated throughout and AI would never pull
ahead, while Gregory Stock much more sensibly argued that pure AIs would
have a tremendous advantage over biology. The basis for Gregory Stock's
argument for a human future is that machines will pull ahead so fast as to
leave us to our own resources, and that uploading and brain-computer
interfacing is a problem so hard as to be infeasible, especially by
comparison with machine intelligence - thus leaving *us* with biology.
I and several others attempted to point out during the Q&A session that just
because uploading is hard for humans does not make it infeasible for machine
intelligences - which Gregory Stock concedes will exist and will even be
interested in helping humans - but Kurzweil did not use this argument. Nor
did Kurzweil use any of Finney's arguments. On the whole, I would have to
say that Kurzweil lost the debate. Pretty sad.
-- -- -- -- --
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky http://singinst.org/
Research Fellow, Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence
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