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Science as Attire
- coldtea 5y ago>Saying “because of evolution” instead of “because of intelligent design” does not, for them, prohibit Storm. Its only purpose, for them, is to identify with a tribe. Well, kind of like the article: meant to identify with the rationalist "I really care for science, am not just using it as attire" tribe. >I encounter people who are quite willing to entertain the notion of dumber-than-human artificial intelligence, or even mildly smarter-than-human artificial intelligence. Introduce the notion of strongly superhuman artificial intelligence, and they’ll suddenly decide it’s “pseudoscience.” It’s not that they think they have a theory of intelligence which lets them calculate a theoretical upper bound on the power of an optimization process. Rather, they associate strongly superhuman AI to the literary genre of apocalyptic literature; whereas an AI running a small corporation associates to the literary genre of Wired magazine. They aren’t speaking from within a model of cognition. They don’t realize they need a model. Well, it's kind of like those who believe in superhuman AI. It's not like they have a model of cognition that allows it (and especially the ludicrous claims of infinitely scalable world-dominating AI, where intelligence translates to power over people and things without some casual explanation. Apparently it would be too convincing for some people not to follow what it tells them). Rather, they've read too much sci-fi which had such AI and they think it would be neat (if frightful). Plus, they identify as all about intelligence themselves (they're non-ironically "the rationalists"), and thus the superhuman AI's power is basically their nerd fantasy.