Have you for example asked Douglas Hofstadter why he isn’t doing everything he can to mitigate risks from AI?
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett both seem to think these issues are probably still far away.
The reason I have injected myself into that world, unsavory though I find it in many ways, is that I think that it’s a very confusing thing that they’re suggesting. If you read Ray Kurzweil’s books and Hans Moravec’s, what I find is that it’s a very bizarre mixture of ideas that are solid and good with ideas that are crazy. It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can’t possibly figure out what’s good or bad. It’s an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it’s very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they’re not stupid.
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Kelly said to me, “Doug, why did you not talk about the singularity and things like that in your book?” And I said, “Frankly, because it sort of disgusts me, but also because I just don’t want to deal with science-fiction scenarios.” I’m not talking about what’s going to happen someday in the future; I’m not talking about decades or thousands of years in the future. I’m talking about “What is a human being? What is an ‘I’?” This may be an outmoded question to ask 30 years from now. Maybe we’ll all be floating blissfully in cyberspace, there won’t be any human bodies left, maybe everything will be software living in virtual worlds, it may be science-fiction city. Maybe my questions will all be invalid at that point. But I’m not writing for people 30 years from now, I’m writing for people right now. We still have human bodies. We don’t yet have artificial intelligence that is at this level. It doesn’t seem on the horizon.
Douglas Hofstadter and Daniel Dennett both seem to think these issues are probably still far away.
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http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/douglas-r-hofstadter