Hall gives a passable history of AI, acts as a messenger for a lot of standard AI ideas, including the Dennett compatibilist account of free will and some criticisms of nonreductionist accounts of consciousness, and acts as a messenger for a stew of social science ideas, e.g. social capital and transparent motivations, although the applicability of the latter is often questionable. Those sections aren’t bad.
It’s only when he gets to considering the dynamics of powerful intelligences and offers up original ideas that he makes glaring errors. Since that’s your specialty, those mistakes stand out as horribly egregious, while casual readers might miss them or think them outweighed by the other sections of the book.
I see differences between you and Drescher, or you and Greene, both in substance (e.g. some clear errors in Drescher’s book when he discusses the ethical value of rock-minds, neglecting the possibility that happy experiences of others could figure in our utility functions directly, rather than only through game theoretic interactions with powerful agents) and in presentation/formalization/frameworks.
We could try to quantify percentage overlap in views on specific questions.
Hall gives a passable history of AI, acts as a messenger for a lot of standard AI ideas, including the Dennett compatibilist account of free will and some criticisms of nonreductionist accounts of consciousness, and acts as a messenger for a stew of social science ideas, e.g. social capital and transparent motivations, although the applicability of the latter is often questionable. Those sections aren’t bad.
It’s only when he gets to considering the dynamics of powerful intelligences and offers up original ideas that he makes glaring errors. Since that’s your specialty, those mistakes stand out as horribly egregious, while casual readers might miss them or think them outweighed by the other sections of the book.
I see differences between you and Drescher, or you and Greene, both in substance (e.g. some clear errors in Drescher’s book when he discusses the ethical value of rock-minds, neglecting the possibility that happy experiences of others could figure in our utility functions directly, rather than only through game theoretic interactions with powerful agents) and in presentation/formalization/frameworks.
We could try to quantify percentage overlap in views on specific questions.