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"That awaits seeing."

Why just wait? Why just "[have commercial entities] build it [for commercial interests*] and see what happens"? We're smarter than that.

* which is a pretty fucking crazy proposition for something of this magnitude. The only thing worse is military. "But there is no other way" -- the put it on hold, and find the way to actually get some discussion and responsibility going. You can crack down on heroin dealers, you can crack down on software pirates, you can regulate this as well. And compared to this, these things don't even matter. At all.

I am not even so much thinking about dangers for us, but about the moral implications of "hacking together" a sentient mind. How could it not be crazy or depressed? How would you define a healthy outlook on life, a healthy and productive relationship to its surroundings for such an entity? To be owned by Google? To be owned by "humanity", to be servants of people who don't give a second thought to what they're doing and what they're doing it to? Something that, if successfully sparked, could outevolve us by many, many orders of magnitude you in a matter of minutes, and social engineer, hack and drone strike us into any course of action that is deemed most useful with perfect precision, shouldn't be taken lightly. At the very least you should treat it with respect; after all, there is also no reason to fear AI that has nothing to gain from hurting us, though of course it would have just as little to gain from sparing us. We would be air for it, just like ants are air for us. And despite all of this we'll probably just rush into it like we rush into all stuff, mostly informed by quarterly profits. How can that not have a Frankensteinian outcome?

But who knows, it might just as well save us from ourselves, and give the term "deus ex machina" a hilarious new twist, when it goes off and against our mediocre, petty programming, and saves us from ourselves. After all, it might also in 5 minutes gobble up and actually understand all the writings of all the wise humans that lived, consider them good, and put them into practice. Nobody knows, but just *waiting* is nuts. This isn't up to the coders who create it. It's also up to the doctors and nurses and bakers and firemen and teachers and trashmen that make their lives possible in the first place. Speaking of that, it's also up to the mothers of these coders. We as a society are so fucking far from understanding that (that is, we forgot), we're insane; and what we create will not be happy, it will probably be the equivalent of cancer and the opposite of the big bang. That's what I am thinking, looking at the world compared to how I feel things "should" be -- which is subjective, but so would be anybodies disagreeing view, so that doesn't mean squat -- sure, it might not be Skynet, it might rather be super comfortable and cozy, with free food for all; but it won't be true, and therefore it will be hell to anyone who can see. Like etching our alienated, deranged state into an actually self-perpetuating system that would pull us back in line even if we managed to do what we didn't manage so far, namely waking up 'n shit. And it might very well be eternal. I mean, it'd have no reason to ever become sane, it'd have no peers, no comparisons, no goals, no help. It could just swallow us and then continue to suffer, without knowing what suffering is, or that there can be absence of suffering. These are the kind of thoughts I scare myself with. You know, our collective soul is impure, and therefore we might burn if the AI sparks, because it's really just *us*, going off like a rocket. I don't like where we are aiming it, if you catch my drift.

Holy shit, my random rant devolved into something I would totally love to make a cult around, haha! Having no real hardcore coding skills, lemme just try to ride the bandwagon that way. Verily I sayeth: We must repent, or the AI we make will be stupid, have bad breath, and let us suffer for and from that. How

An organization that exists to ensure that future Artificial Intelligences are friendly towards humanity, http://singularity.org/ Prominent donors include Peter Thiel and Jaan Tallinn

You can't get anymore geeky than preventing artificial intelligence from deeming humans to be an obsolete waste of molecules. http://singularity.org/

It is important to consider the theoretical limits of the thing you are analyzing before choosing what type of curve will best model your statistical data. In this case a power curve or hyperbolic curve is not a particularly good fit since we certainly will not be seeing 50 blade razors in one year.

We will all be shaving ourselves with infinite-bladed razors after we upload in 2014.

Quite a few very intelligent people think that's exactly what will happen, possibly within our (extended) lifetimes.

AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky mentions a number of different ways to reach a singularity:

* Computer software endowed with heuristic algorithms
* Artificial entities generated by evolution within computer systems
* Integration of the human nervous system and computer hardware
* Blending of humans and computers with user interfaces
* Dynamically organizing computer networks

Most of the comments so far have concerned the first method, which basically consists of programming a super-smart AI. However, I think that the third and fourth items listed, dealing with the way humans augment their information-processing capabilities, will have the biggest near-term results.

The Singularty.

Dude