edge | What makes us different from all these things? What makes us
different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions
of purpose and goals. That's a long way of saying when we have the box
on the desk that thinks as well as any brain does, the thing it doesn't
have, intrinsically, is the goals and purposes that we have. Those are
defined by our particulars—our particular biology, our particular
psychology, our particular cultural history.
The thing we have to think about as we think about the future of
these things is the goals. That's what humans contribute, that's what
our civilization contributes—execution of those goals; that's what we
can increasingly automate. We've been automating it for thousands of
years. We will succeed in having very good automation of those goals.
I've spent some significant part of my life building technology to
essentially go from a human concept of a goal to something that gets
done in the world.
There are many questions that come from this. For example, we've
got these great AIs and they're able to execute goals, how do we tell
them what to do?...
