The fluffiness of this article reminds me of a passage from "Debt, The First 5,000 years" by John Graeber:
> For years, everyone had been hearing of a whole host of new, ultrasophisticated financial innovations: credit and commodity derivatives, collateralized mortgage obligation derivatives, hybrid securities, debt swaps, and so on. These new derivative markets were so incredibly sophisticated, that-according to one persistent story-a prominent investment house had to employ astrophysicists to run trading programs... I well remember going to conferences in 2006 and 2007 where trendy social theorists presented papers arguing that these new forms of securitization, linked to new information technologies, heralded a looming transformation in the very nature of time, possibly reality itself. I remember thinking: "Suckers!" And so they were.
Exactly. There are so many things wrong with this, on a biology level, on a computer science level, and on a philosophical level, and even going back to the Monodo 2000 days (which is back on line by the way http://www.mondo2000.com) it's been a while since I've read something that emits this kind of glue huffing hyperbole.
Look, we're all evolved biological creatures which operate in a physical reality, but do you really want the guys writing the javascript on your banking web site re-programming your brain? AI guys can talk a good game, but they are also kind of hacky programmers.
I'm on the materialist side of the spectrum but bootstrapping from bio to silicon, just think about it... just, spend 30 seconds breathing and think about whether you want your brain running on an Intel chip.
Humans have been underestimating the difficulty in building truly intelligence machines since the 50s. Whenever we do reach it, what will happen after that is really anyone's guess. Those who pretend to know are just selling you their own half-baked ideas.
