Re: purpose of AIs

Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Sun, 12 Dec 1999 16:03:58 -0600

The goal of AIs is to create something substantially smarter than a human in all domains, from science to philosophy, so that there's no question of who judges the AI to be intelligent; the AI is a better judge than we are.

The purpose of AI is to create something substantially smarter than human, bringing about the next step into the future - the first truly substantial step since the rise of the Cro-Magnons - and ending human history before it gets ugly (nanotechnological warfare, et cetera). We don't really know what comes after that, because the AIs are smarter than we are; if we knew what they'd do, we'd be that smart ourselves. But it's probably better than sticking with human minds until we manage to blow ourselves up.
--

           sentience@pobox.com          Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
        http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS           Typing in Dvorak          Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way