I put cryonics in the reference class of a “success of a technical project on a poorly understood system”. Which means that most of medical research comes under that heading. So not good odds but not very small.
I put AGI in the same class, although it has the off putting property of possible recursion (in that it is trying to understand understanding, which is just a little hairy). Which means it might be a special case in how easy it is to solve, with the evidence so far pointing at the harder end of the spectrum.
For FOOM and the singularity I put it in the class of extrapolation from highly complex poorly understood theory. This gets a low probability of being right. But AGI is also in the reference class of potential world changing technologies (nukes), so still a good idea to tread carefully and try and get it into the class of better understood theories.
Do most technical projects on poorly understood systems, that are as broadly defined as “cryonics” or “AGI”, in fact never succeed no matter how much effort is put into them? I think we may be talking about different propositions here.
I was talking about the chance we will make these things before we go extinct. And they might also be in the reference class of perpetual motion machines, but that seems unlikely as we have a natural exemplar for General Intelligence.
ETA: And to narrow down what I thinking of when i said cryonics and AGI. Cryonics: reanimation from current or next 50 year freezing methods. AGI: GI runnable on standard silicon.
I put cryonics in the reference class of a “success of a technical project on a poorly understood system”. Which means that most of medical research comes under that heading. So not good odds but not very small.
I put AGI in the same class, although it has the off putting property of possible recursion (in that it is trying to understand understanding, which is just a little hairy). Which means it might be a special case in how easy it is to solve, with the evidence so far pointing at the harder end of the spectrum.
For FOOM and the singularity I put it in the class of extrapolation from highly complex poorly understood theory. This gets a low probability of being right. But AGI is also in the reference class of potential world changing technologies (nukes), so still a good idea to tread carefully and try and get it into the class of better understood theories.
Do most technical projects on poorly understood systems, that are as broadly defined as “cryonics” or “AGI”, in fact never succeed no matter how much effort is put into them? I think we may be talking about different propositions here.
I was talking about the chance we will make these things before we go extinct. And they might also be in the reference class of perpetual motion machines, but that seems unlikely as we have a natural exemplar for General Intelligence.
ETA: And to narrow down what I thinking of when i said cryonics and AGI. Cryonics: reanimation from current or next 50 year freezing methods. AGI: GI runnable on standard silicon.