Comment by senttoschool
3 years ago
>I think discussions about superintelligence are mostly pointless. They are storytelling at best, and often little more than bullshitting.
That's like saying in the 1800s that we shouldn't ever investigate atoms because it's mostly pointless and storytelling at best.
Personally, I think we need to be discussing this now. Smart people need to be. We need to come up with models for AI intelligence, which might help us predict when and if superintelligence occurs.
Philosophers have been talking about atoms for thousands of years, and most of it turned out to be pointless bullshitting. Then, a few years before 1800, scientists started using atoms an an explanation for measurable phenomena in chemistry. And that's how scientific theories of atoms came to be: not as hypothetical constructs, but as explanations for something that could be observed.
And we have been talking about a super intelligence since the 60s?
It’s not like it’s completely out of the blue.