[SEQ RERUN] Artificial Addition
Today’s post, Artificial Addition was originally published on 20 November 2007. A summary (taken from the LW wiki):
If you imagine a world where people are stuck on the “artifical addition” (i.e. machine calculator) problem, the way people currently are stuck on artificial intelligence, and you saw them trying the same popular approaches taken today toward AI, it would become clear how silly they are. Contrary to popular wisdom (in that world or ours), the solution is not to “evolve” an artificial adder, or invoke the need for special physics, or build a huge database of solutions, etc. -- because all of these methods dodge the crucial task of understanding what addition involves, and instead try to dance around it. Moreover, the history of AI research shows the problems of believing assertions one cannot re-generate from one’s own knowledge.
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we’ll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky’s old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Conjuring an Evolution to Serve You, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
Sequence reruns are a community-driven effort. You can participate by re-reading the sequence post, discussing it here, posting the next day’s sequence reruns post, or summarizing forthcoming articles on the wiki. Go here for more details, or to have meta discussions about the Rerunning the Sequences series.
Upcoming posts in need of summaries:
Leaky Generalizations, The Hidden Complexity of Wishes, Purpose and Pragmatism