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Ben Recht's avatar

Being brought back here from your twitter. Fredkin may have been the first to use "superintelligence," but IJ Good used the same weird rhetoric and the term "ultraintelligence" in 1966.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065245808604180

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

I know! As I keep saying, it would be interesting to do a sociological study of AI along the lines of Latour and Woolgar, to trace the emergence of these currents of thought. I wouldn't be surprised if a strong correlation were found between the weird belief in self-improving ultra/super-intelligence and mathematical Platonism.

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Ben Recht's avatar

There has to be a switch at 1950 after we actualized computers. No? It's clear that AI Doom/Golem Fear is present by the mid 1950s, but I haven't found the emergence of the idea yet.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NN7mlicU95w

We need to figure out what was happening before WWII. Maybe time to reread R.U.R.?

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Misha Belkin's avatar

Very interesting, I did not know about this book. Planning to read it when I get time.

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Lalitha Sankar's avatar

Thanks for sharing this with us, Max. I enjoyed reading it. That you found a photo of Shannon with these men was amusing. Maybe all of them will be happier to know that the 21st century will include more women and people from across the world in such discussions. While fact at times seems to mirror fiction or predictions, reality is far more nuanced. I really don't fully know how AI will affect us, do you? Do we have data for the internet and it's effect on life, as was stated at the turn of this century to be life-changing? I recognize AI is much more but nobody quite predicted the internet as it is.

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Maxim Raginsky's avatar

Here’s what McCorduck wrote in the postscript chapter that was added to the 2004 edition:

“I let Lotfi Zadeh persuade me into participating in one of these [debates about AI] at Berkeley in the late 1970s, though I began my presentation by stating that scientific issues were not settled by rhetoric, but by doing science. However, when I pointed out that many of the reasons my adversary offered against the possibility of artificial intelligence were eerily parallel to the arguments made in the 1800s against the possibility of women thinking (their bodies, their emotions, their “different brains), I do believe I won the day.”

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