I do think history suggests the end of the world, immortality, etc. is not in our lifetime any more than it was in Ponce de Leon or Charles Lindbergh’s lifetime, but there is some serious counterevidence in our time, such as the gap between the predicted time to complete the human genome project and its actual completion.

I notice that Stuart Hameroff claims the estimates are out by a factor of a trillion – e.g. see: A New Marriage of Brain and Computer.

However, as far as I can tell, Hameroff is off in Penrose’s la-la land – and appears to have totally lost touch with reality

No, the irony is that both are equally wrong

Bostrom’s Oracle’s the way to go man. Get into Ontology/KR. You only get a good Upper Ontology to a get a universal parser. ; Semantic Web is evolving, a good Upper Ontology will be commerically valuable soon. Get some money.

You have no read Kurzweil’s book, have you?

Maybe just watching this would be a good start:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/327/

His line of reasoning with regard to the amount of processing power it takes to emulate a human brain is also based on the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning techniques, which are also improving exponentially. He’s saying that at some point we’ll be able to scan a human brain with enough precision to then be able to simulate it in a model running on hardware that is fast enough (with enough memory, etc) to make it work.

Nobody can know if that’s going to be the way AI will happen, but it’s one of many plausible paths.

The ‘true believers’ in the idea that Libertarianism is the best political system are also the most enthusiastic supporters of the idea that ‘Bayes is the secret of the universe’. The ‘market’ tries to assign value to everything in purely functional terms. In much the same fashion, ‘Bayes’ tries to assign truth values purely in functional terms (ie external prediction sequences). Major irony there.

If by ‘irony’ you mean ‘consistency’.

Curious, are there people you think are doing a particularly good job of “integration of this scenario into future policy visions, including visions of poverty, ecology, population, despotism, etc,” either in fiction or non-fiction?

Definitely agree on reducing the silliness factor, I guess the question is how to match Eliezer’s “future shock level” to the audience. Hard to do when SL1 media gloms on to SL4 concepts and ridicules them to SL0 readers…

In early 1945, how many people were occupied with ending World War II in comparison to how many were occupied with preventing atomic war? WW2 ended that year; the prospect of nuclear annihilation would remain a critical concern for decades to come. Of course, both issues required critical attention, just like obtaining food is a daily concern for me, while paying my rent is a monthly concern, and continuing my education is a yearly concern. However, that shouldn’t relegate my longest-term concerns – like what I’ll be doing in twenty years – to the dustbin.

The ‘true believers’ in the idea that Libertarianism is the best political system are also the most enthusiastic supporters of the idea that ‘Bayes is the secret of the universe’. The ‘market’ tries to assign value to everything in purely functional terms. In much the same fashion, ‘Bayes’ tries to assign truth values purely in functional terms (ie external prediction sequences). Major irony there.

A factor of a thousand is ten doublings. Not too much for Moore’s law to sweat over. But where are these “very reasonable neurological arguments” – and what are they actually worth? The existing extimates come from multiple sources – as explained by Kurzweil – and they haven’t changed that much in 20 years.