Science, Technology & the Future
James Newton-Thomas speaks at the Singularity Salon.
Speaks on the Arrogance of human ability. Is there an island of human intellectual uniqueness?
The industrial revolution replaced the need for us to use our muscle, whereas the future of Artificial Intelligence will replace our own intelligence.
The jobs we do are by nature specialized. Specialized jobs are vulnerable to narrow AI taking over – there is room for this to happen before we have ‘artificial general intelligence’.
James says that AGI is a long way off mainly because costly human specialists can be replaced by Narrow AI – and so the only near term interest in AGI is purely academic. James skepticism about AGI in the short term is economic.
James would vote for an AI Prime Minister. Democracy is a distributed search mechanism. Though this will not work where there is a vast informational and intellectual disparity.
James believes that it is possible to have friendly AI. By intuiting the AI with altruism / empathy it will be come emphathic to us, thusly gaining happiness by being friendly to us.
Previous discussions @ Singularity Salon have been on Chalmers paper, Beleif as Attire (Less Wrong), the H+ Summit 2011, and the Singularity Summit 2010.
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