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THIEL: "one other way of interpreting the AI boom is that on the surface, it is about extreme optimism about the potentialities of computer technology, and the

THIEL: "one other way of interpreting the AI boom is that on the surface, it is about extreme optimism about the potentialities of computer technology, and the beneath the surface, it is simultaneously, perhaps, a great deal of pessimism around the possibilities in other technologies that will be developed by humans, and deep pessimism about the possibility of what humans can do." This is what I think about whenever I hear folks scaremongering about the "singularity". In my opinion these beliefs reflect a kind of spiritual emptiness; a yearning for answers that only God can fulfill.

ThomPete 10y ago
So you are ready to believe that physics and chemistry created simple organism which through the process of evolution become more complex organism eventually turning into us. But you can't believe that this evolution will continue? Perhaps it's exactly because their argument is empty of spiritualism that they see the world more clearly.
norea-armozel 10y ago
I'm of the mind the technological singularity won't come from AI but from enhanced human minds. I think it's easier to load more memory, processing, and the like indirectly to the human brain that it is to recreate a perfect mind inside a machine not even equipped to handle the questions we wish to ask it.
eli_gottlieb 10y ago
What I find funny is people who think that metaphysics is real, even at the mild level of mathematical Platonism, but think that it can only ever be figured out from our armchairs, that there's no way I could build a machine to do it for me. On the other hand, I find it pretty easily believable that we can receive compounding returns from advances in ML/AI. After all, pretty much as soon as we invent new techniques in computational statistics, the go-to fields needing to apply them are the other computational sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine.

ThomPete 10y ago

So you are ready to believe that physics and chemistry created simple organism which through the process of evolution become more complex organism eventually turning into us. But you can't believe that this evolution will continue? Perhaps it's exactly because their argument is empty of spiritualism that they see the world more clearly.

norea-armozel 10y ago

I'm of the mind the technological singularity won't come from AI but from enhanced human minds. I think it's easier to load more memory, processing, and the like indirectly to the human brain that it is to recreate a perfect mind inside a machine not even equipped to handle the questions we wish to ask it.

eli_gottlieb 10y ago

What I find funny is people who think that metaphysics is real, even at the mild level of mathematical Platonism, but think that it can only ever be figured out from our armchairs, that there's no way I could build a machine to do it for me. On the other hand, I find it pretty easily believable that we can receive compounding returns from advances in ML/AI. After all, pretty much as soon as we invent new techniques in computational statistics, the go-to fields needing to apply them are the other computational sciences: physics, chemistry, biology, medicine.