Some facts and opinions: (first one is not ad hominem, just letting people know the website owner) Elizeer Yudkowski never graduated high school or attended co

Some facts and opinions: (first one is not ad hominem, just letting people know the website owner) Elizeer Yudkowski never graduated high school or attended college. While there are genuine well-educated autodidacts, there are also people in the world who have perfected the art of sounding like they know what they are talking about to the right crowd while lacking any real depth of understanding in the subjects on which they speak. Having read and read about Yudkowski I believe he is more the latter than the former. So now I take lesswrong articles with a gigantic grain of salt. They may be entertaining and thought provoking but they can hardly be considered to contain expert or learned opinions or projections that correspond to the real world as it actually is as opposed to some puerile scifi fantasy or pseudo-religion dressed up with fancy language. My personal opinion is that there will be no "singularity" and "AI" is massively over-hyped and not intelligence. Intelligence is a part adaptive part emergent phenomenon of sentient biological life and computers are certainly neither sentient or biological yet. The adaptive part is more important than the emergent part. General intelligence does not just emerge accidentally. Rather it needs to be molded by the constraints of Darwinian goal seeking in diverse hostile environments. Second, Moore's law was not ever a law. Rather it was the extrapolation of an observation. It held for some time. But as the discussion of multi-core chips below intimates it is not really holding any more. Adding more cores or more speed does not make a computer more intelligent because a computer lacks the motivation to reproduce that biological creatures have, that is the root of intelligence as an adaptive phenomenon. Third every growing thing, including technological progress, is ultimately bound by constraints of the relatively simple laws of physics: limits to energy, space, time, etc. Thus what appear to be exponential growth functions in the long run turn into logistic functions. There is no evidence that advancing technology can indefinitely increase the returns to engineering applications of the laws of physics.