SIAI President Michael Vassar and SIAI Director of Research Ben Goertzel recently had short articles published in Forbes magazine’s online AI Report. Here is an excerpt from the beginning of Michael Vassar’s article:

Are you in a city? If so, may I ask you to look around? Almost everything you see was created deliberately. Human minds built theories and implemented plans. Due to these plans, rocks were gathered, shaped and rearranged. You call some of these rocks your house. The main things that weren’t created deliberately are the minds themselves.

Humans are primarily natural, not designed. Human culture shapes personal development, but on an absolute scale culture permits only a very narrow range of possibilities. A human can be raised to be an Inca, a teacher or a psychoanalyst. More careful upbringing and good luck can produce a Mozart, an Einstein or a Julius Caesar, but never a dolphin, a raven or an elephant. Michael Phelps is astounding for a human, but a dolphin can cross an Olympic pool in seconds.

Continue Michael’s article here, or read Ben’s article here.

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 8th, 2009 at 9:27 am by michaelanissimov and is filed under Buzz - Pre-conference. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.