Superintelligence, WTF

Tyler Cowen has a post about his own entry in a Free Press mini-symposium on superintelligence: Mark Zuckerberg Says ‘Superintelligence’ Is Imminent. What Is It? What it is, to be honest, is a time-sink for people with more time & brains than sense. But what’s a poor guy to do, eh? I like Matt Britton’s observation: “Mark Zuckerberg’s announcement is more a reflection that Meta has fallen behind in the global AI arms race than it is an indication of a turning point in the company’s capabilities.” Cowen? He believes “that future AIs will be very smart and useful, but still will have significant limitations and will not achieve those milestones anytime soon.” OK, though judging from the way he toots the AI horn at Marginal Revolution I would have thought him to be more gung-ho.

Whatever.

Out of curiosity I went to Google's Ngram viewer and took a look at “superintelligence.”

Sure enough, the first real action occurs at 2014, with the publication of Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies. But it lists a smattering of books before that. The oldest is Artificial Superintelligence, published in 1999 by one Azamat Abdoullaev. The most interesting is Simple Heuristics that Make Us Smart (2000), by Gerd Gigerenzer, ‎Peter M. Todd, and ‎ABC Research Group. It has an index entry for “Laplace’s superintelligence,” by which they mean “Laplace’s demon,” Wikipedia:

According to determinism, if someone (the demon) knows the precise location and momentum of every particle in the universe, their past and future values for any given time are entailed; they can be calculated from the laws of classical mechanics.

Hmmm....I wonder if the idea of superintelligence should now be dubbed “Bostrom’s demon”?  

Nick Bostrum vs. the 300-Ton Hydraulic Press: Take That!

Bostrum ranks high on my list of over-rated intellectual annoyances but, alas, I feel that I have to deal with some of the glittering baubles he has released into the world. I have a number of posts dealing with that pesky simulation hypothesis he foisted on the world shortly after the turn of the millennium and some of my other posts on various topics no doubt mention him as well. For someone with my interests he's unavoidable.

Anyhow, he’s got a new book out: Deep Utopia: Life and Meaning in a Solved World. Here’s a podcast in which he discusses it:

I decided to take a look because, as I said, he’s all over the place so I might as well see what he’s up to. It seems he’s imagining what life would be like when all possible technologies have been invented, and they are benevolent. What would we do? How would we find meaning? I listened to as much as I could take, a half hour or so, and then decided to take a nap.

Fifteen minutes later I decided to watch the most recent video from the Hydraulic Press Channel. As you may know, the Hydraulic Press Channel is one of my favorite YouTube channels. I’ve been watching it for years. What could be more fun than watching a big machine crush things? In their most recent video they use their big new 300-ton press (which I’ve recently posted about) to crush hammers. What fun!

One problem with Bostrom is that he seems to live in a world in which no one has the type of imagination that takes pleasure in such an utterly useless activity, much less expends time and effort developing the facilities needed to do it more effectively. Come to think of it, one of the things they like to do is crush paper and books. I wonder how many hardback copies of Bostrom’s book their press could crush in a single pass? Is that an activity that would be popular in a solved world?