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Not Built to Think About AI
In the Terminator movies, the Skynet AI becomes self-aware, kills billions of people, and dispatches killer robots to wipe out the remaining bands of human resistance fighters. That sounds pretty bad,...
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Playing Taboo with “Intelligence”
Eliezer Yudkowsky recounts: Years ago when I was on a panel with Jaron Lanier, he had offered some elaborate argument that no machine could be intelligent, because it was just a machine and to call it...
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Superstition in Retreat
Once upon a time, everything was magic. Why did lightning crack and the earth quake? The gods were angry. Why did some go crazy? Demons possessed them. Why did some prosper? They had done good in a...
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Plenty of Room Above Us
Why are AIs in movies so often of roughly human-level intelligence? One reason is that we almost always fail to see non-humans as non-human. We anthropomorphize. That’s why aliens and robots in fiction...
View ArticleDon’t Flinch Away
Perhaps you’ve heard of the Japanese holdouts who refused to believe the reports of Japan’s surrender in 1945. One of them was Lt. Hiroo Onoda, who was in charge of three other soldiers on the island...
View ArticleNo God to Save Us
Losing my belief in God was rough at first, because I’d been taught that without God there was no value, no purpose, no joy, no love—just atoms bouncing around. Later I got all those things back....
View ArticleValue is Complex and Fragile
One day, my friend Niel asked his virtual assistant in India to find him a bike he could buy that day. She sent him a list of bikes for sale from all over the world. Niel said, “No, I need one I can...
View ArticleIntelligence Explosion
Suppose you’re a disembodied spirit watching the universe evolve. For the first nine billion years, almost nothing happens. “God, this is so boring!” you complain. “How so?” asks your partner. “There’s...
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The AI Problem, with Solutions
We find ourselves at a crucial moment in Earth’s history. Like a boulder perched upon a mountain’s peak, we stand at an unstable point. We cannot stay where we are: AI is coming provided that...
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Engineering Utopia
I’ve already talked about how things can go very, very wrong with AI. With no God to save us, we’re left with physics—and nothing in the laws of physics says that humanity won’t fail miserably and die....
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