Three arguments against the singularity | Hacker News Reader

Three arguments against the singularity

antipope.org

Most of the points in the essay (there's more than three) seem to me to be wrong or off target. I started typing a point-by-point response but it turned out quite long. If someone has the impression that the essay has some decisive strong point, could you point it out so I can respond to just that?

EDIT: as a demonstration, I will deal with the first point in the essay. It says: "super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely". Actually, getting to strong AI through math (rather than through mimicking humans) sounds more probable to me. We already have formalisms that can compute the most accurate possible prediction and the most efficient possible way to optimize a a utility function (inferring the right physical laws in the process) if given tons of computing power, for example look up Solomonoff induction or Marcus Hutter's AIXI. These count as superintelligences, or at least superweapons that can destroy the world. Stross's argument does not demonstrate the unlikelihood of someone implementing a fast approximation to AIXI tomorrow.

I agree with you, but I think I can respond in summary instead of point-by-point:

"First: super-intelligent AI is unlikely because, if you pursue Vernor's program, you get there incrementally by way of human-equivalent AI, and human-equivalent AI is unlikely."

The arguments that follow don't say anything about why it's impossible or even prohibitively difficult to do, they only provide reasons why people wouldn't want to try. There are, however, motivations beyond those he takes into consideration.

Uploading: Again, he doesn't make any arguments as to why uploading is not achievable, he just talks about the very hard ethical questions that arise when dealing with uploaded intelligences. That didn't stop us from inventing nuclear weapons and a host of other ethicaly challenging technologies, so why would it stop us from inventing uploading?

One particular statement he makes in this section I do want to address specifically: "Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the existence of an immortal soul, and therefore presents a raw rebuttal to those religious doctrines that believe in a life after death."

This is so obviously untrue that I don't know how any intelligent person could use it in a serious argument. Religions that believe in immortal souls will simply maintain that the uploaded copy is just that: a copy, a soulless simulation of a real person. How can you possibly prove this one way or another? "Soul" is a purely religious concept, beyond any temporal means of observation or measurement, and therefore not subject to empirical study. I still think you would see plenty of religious people oppose uploading, but for different reasons.

He finishes by discussing the possibility that our entire universe is already a simulation being run in the "real" world, and admits that nobody can prove this one way or another, at least not anytime soon.

"Religions that believe in immortal souls will simply maintain that the uploaded copy is just that: a copy, a soulless simulation of a real person."

This might be true of some religious institutions but not of all. The concept of the 'Soul' is actually derived from Aristotelianism (there is no mention of it as such in the Bible) and many sects, (particularly Catholics) believe that in order for something to be intelligent it needs to have a soul, that is, an immaterial aspect. If an uploaded person, or an AI, or space alien or whatever is demonstrated to be intelligent, it would by definition have a 'soul.'

You would still get lots of folks who refused to accept the person-hood of uploaded persons and those folks might actually dominate, but the actual theological consequences would be different (and far more complex) than you imagine.

The concept of the 'Soul' is actually derived from Aristotelianism (there is no mention of it as such in the Bible)

Wrong, and wrong. The notion of the "soul" in Greek philosophy predates Aristotle; it's found in Plato's Phaedo, for example-- and there are several words in the Hebrew bible that are usually translated as "soul" (nefesh and ruach, which correspond roughly to psyche and pneuma, respectively.)

"and there are several words in the Hebrew bible that are usually translated as "soul""

I stand corrected on this.

"The notion of the "soul" in Greek philosophy predates Aristotle."

True, but my point is that certain sects of Christianity borrow heavily from Greek philosophy when trying to intellectualize what a 'soul' actually is. Some tend to follow the Aristotelian conception rather than the Platonic (they are distinct.) I'm not trying to say that Aristotle invented the concept of the soul if that's what you're thinking.

Very interesting. I see a few possible lines of argument that sects who believe this (must have soul to be intelligent) could take. The more crude argument would be a variation of "no true scotsman:" It's not really intelligent, it's just doing a very good job of reproducing the behavior of an intellingent being." There are a lot of issues with that argument, so a better approach might be, "When it becomes intelligent, God endows it with a distinct, unique, and individual soul." Another possible approach would be, "The original and the copy share the same immortal soul," but that would be incompatible with some concepts of the afterlife. There's also a version heavy on FUD: "When it becomes intelligent, it is possessed by an evil soul."

Yes, religions will almost always maintain a position that retains their previous "correctness", but if you could make a "soulless simulation" that is indistinguishable from the "real thing", it'd make a lot of people scratch their heads and say "wait, so what role does the soul play here?" ... it would seem to make the soul redundant. (Of course, that feeling of the soul's lack of necessity has already happened for most that have any knowledge of modern neuroscience.)

There's also the position in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn series that all sentient minds have souls, regardless of how they were created or whether there's a similar mind somewhere out there. And presumably Christian's can always say "God can figure it out" with regards to what exactly where the boundaries should be.

Religion is a fine art of emotional manipulation, but it has a weak spot: it requires an intact emotional (limbic) system. What if our artificial counterparts forgo that?

Many philosophers and theologians have made completely rational (emotion-free) arguments in favor of religion (sometimes a particular religion, sometimes religion in general).

That being said, I'll accept your fallacious assumption for a moment and turn your question around: what if an emotional system is necessary for self-aware, volitional intelligence? Our emotions are inseperably intertwined with the other aspects of our minds, and it might very well be that they are a fundamental aspect of consciousness.

Many philosophers and theologians have made completely rational (emotion-free) arguments in favor of religion (sometimes a particular religion, sometimes religion in general).

Many philosophers and theologians have attempted to make completely rational arguments in favor of the existence of God. My liberal arts theme in undergrad was philosophy so I've read a fair amount, but I have yet to see a compelling argument yet. Could you please make some suggestions?

Just because you didn't find them compelling doesn't mean they are somehow flawed. There are whole schools of philosophy that are mutually exclusive and yet are subscribed to each by many very intelligent people who are unable to decisively prove each other wrong. Having studied so much philosophy, you of all people should understand that there is a huge difference between a rational, consistent argument and a proof.

EDIT: Proving or disproving the existence of God is, in general, a fool's game. One could probably prove that certain types of deities are impossible, but it's impossible to prove that no form of deity is possible. On the other hand, proving the existence of God would almost certainly require a well-documented divine intervention, and even then many people would (rightfully) remain skeptical.

Also, my previous post didn't say anything about proving the existence of God: I said that they made "arguments in favor of religion," which is not the same thing. First, not all religions involve deities. Even if you restrict the discussion to religions involving deities, it is possible to argue that it is desireable or advantageous to believe in God without first proving that God exists. Furthermore, even some atheists argue that religion in general or some religions in particular have had a net positive impact on humanity.

Good points here, although i must note that your appeal to authority ("many intelligent people") does not lend credence to any of these arguments. For many people, they are no more true than any random syntactically correct sentence. And in any case, i feel this thread is diverting to a ... religious argument.

p.s. "...but it's impossible to prove that no form of deity is possible" - could you point to a proof of that?

It was not an appeal to authority, nor was it intended to support any of those arguments. It was intended to underscore the point that a particular philosophical argument is not automatically invalid simply because some people, no matter how intelligent and rational, do not find it convincing. In effect, it was a rejection of gp's appeal to his own authority as a student of philosophy.

As for your latter point: if you disprove the possibility of deities with a particular quality or set of qualities, I can then describe a deity which lacks those qualities and is therefore outside the set of deities you have proven impossible. For example, if you can somehow prove that there has never been divine intervention of any form (which I highly doubt is possible to prove), then I could respond by positing a deity that does not intervene in the temporal universe at all, but instead rules only in the afterlife. Since the afterlife is beyond temporal measurement, it is by definition beyond empirical observation, and there is therefore no way you can disprove the existence of an afterlife. By extension, there is no way you can disprove the existence of a deity which rules the afterlife.

Thanks for your time. See, i am an eliminativist myself, so i would doubt things like afterlife and spirit are accessible to us humans. I might accept forms of non-intervening deities if it were confined to setting the initial conditions of the big bang. Point is, arguing against it or for it is like arguing the weather.

Well, if you accept that it's impossible to prove that we aren't in a simulation - then it's possible we are in a simulation, and that would make the being responsible for simulating us a deity of sorts.

a) The arguments i 've heard about religious faith attempt to explain metaphysics by resorting to metaphysics, which, to me, is weak circular logic; but, fair, i don't have the means to disprove them either. My critical attitude was towards religion, the social construct which has historically been used to manipulate human groups through religious faith. Then again maybe religion has been evolutionary advantageous, although it hasn't been around long enough to be selected out of the population.

b) You are right. AFAIK, religious experiences involves the parietal and temporal lobes, so its not just the emotional system. Agree that it's an important (irreplaceable?) part of our self-awareness. However the fact that non-religious people can act ethically in a harmonious society indicates that it might be reduntant. Still, religious beliefs arise in a brain, so there will probably be a way to turn them off (probably not without sideeffects).

Non-religious people can also believe in superstitious, irrational beliefs. Isn't irrationality inevitable?

They can, but they don't have to, so it's not inevitable.

Don't they have to? Isn't everyone irrational to some extent? I mean it may be as little or minor as believing one economic/political theory over another in the absence of clear evidence. Or betting on string theory over another explanation.

Cognomancers, at this point, will attempt to restate what they mean by "irrational" without using it or any close synonyms. They might also try to figure out if religiosity is correlated with greater levels of whatever they mean by "irrationality," or not.

Making a random decision in the absence of empirical evidence is rational thinking. It's irrational to make it in the presence of overwhelming evidence or counter evidence.

CS is an interesting personality. On one hand, he writes fiction about the singularity, AI and interstellar travel, and is clearly enthusiastic about them. On the other hand, in his essays he states that humanity will probably never leave the solar system, and that a singularity will likely never happen.

Also interesting is that most of his arguments seem to be economic ones. In short, "it doesn't seem useful so the required investments to develop it will never be made". Not so much that it is impossible physically.

He might be right, he might be wrong, only time will tell. Personally I don't think it is very useful to make predictions about this (which is kind of the same stance that he takes "it's unwise to live on the assumption that they're coming down the pipeline within my lifetime...").

I always kick the tyres and try to pick holes in an idea before I take it out for a long road trip. That way I'm less likely to have to call the AA ...

Actually, getting to strong AI through math (rather than through mimicking humans) sounds more probable to me. We already have formalisms that can compute the most accurate possible prediction and the most efficient possible way to optimize a a utility function (inferring the right physical laws in the process) if given tons of computing power, for example look up Solomonoff induction or Marcus Hutter's AIXI. These count as superintelligences, or at least superweapons that can destroy the world. Stross's argument does not demonstrate the unlikelihood of someone implementing a fast approximation to AIXI tomorrow.

While that'd be a nice thing to have, it doesn't seem anything like an AI in the usual sense... i.e. the sense in which AIs have personhood and their own thoughts and feelings and goals and so forth.

Such things may not have personhood but they do have internal reasoning, can be built to have real-world goals, can solve any "intelligence-bound" problem (like math or physics) better than any human, and can cause something like the Singularity to occur (which the essay was arguing against in the first place).

It seems that conceptualizing AIs as human-like is the #1 top mistake that leads people to think AIs are impossible (or, alternatively, safe once they're built). It's more enlightening to think of an AI as a cold mathematical machine that uses computational power to achieve whatever goal the original programmer specified, possibly increasing its own power in the process. It will happily eat your babies if it needs more atoms. Its lack of personhood won't save you.

Eliezer Yudkowsky has a very good synonym for "AI" that doesn't trigger anthropomorphism: "Optimization Process". An example is Darwinian Evolution. And it is quite obvious that Evolution isn't alive, sentient, let alone human-like.

Good old evolution. Humans are just one of its fruits, yet we think so highly of ourselves.

If a superhuman AI exists, exactly what evolutionary niche are humans going to fill? Because there's a word for species which don't have an evolutionary niche: extinct.

"It seems that conceptualizing AIs as human-like is the #1 top mistake that leads people to think AIs are impossible (or, alternatively, safe once they're built). It's more enlightening to think of an AI as a cold mathematical machine"

But really, even humans are just cold mathematical machines when you get below a certain layer.

We're mathematical machines but we're anything but cold. I'm quite warm, thank you very much.

Warm and cold are relative terms.

The anti-human-equivalent AI argument was really strange. When you cut out the irrelevant evolutionary stuff and avoid the segue into ethics, he is arguing that we won't have human-level AI in machines because humans don't want to design machines that behave like humans. But in fact that is exactly what many people want to do. Very incoherent argument.

Exactly. And I really don't think Vinge meant "AI having the same goals and attitudes as a human" by "human-equivalent AI". Rather, its pretty clear in context he's talking about intelligence.

Exactly what I wanted to post. There is a lot of totally unsubstantiated and downright incorrect stuff in this.

Very surprising coming from a SciFi person - most people who write SciFi (Scientific themed) tend to perform exhaustive research into existing science. Disappointing...

Your rebuttal can be used as is to argue that an oracle to the Halting Problem is a superintelligence, and that Stross's argument doesn't demonstrate the unlikelihood of someone implementing a fast approximation to it tomorrow.

You're right but this doesn't kill my argument, because not all instances of the halting problem are difficult. It's quite possible that some path to godhood (compared to a puny human) passes only through "easy" instances of the halting problem, efficiently solvable by some simple algorithm. In fact this is how we humans got to our current state of science and progress. Our math capabilities are evolutionarily new and inefficient: some of us can't even multiply 32-bit numbers!

Sure it's possible, but you have no evidence for it. Consider what your argument reduces to:

- CS says the path to super-intelligent AI lies through human-equivalent AI (actually, he says Vinge's program says that, and he explicitly criticizes it)

- but I can find an uncomputable perfectly ideal math function

- and I can hypothesize that maybe it'll be possible to approximate it cheaply

- and I can hypothesize that easy instances of it are good enough

- and I will now view human progress as a way of approximating that function, and submit that only easy instances were used.

This isn't merely red herring, it's red herring full of contradictions. If easy instances are enough, what's the relevance of the provably ideal uncomputable problem, besides rhetoric? If humans used easy instances, and they're the only example we know of that achieved I, how is that not weak evidence that AI through easy instances will pass through human-like I?

> If easy instances are enough, what's the relevance of the provably ideal uncomputable problem, besides rhetoric?

It shows that there's a path to AI that's gated on solving formal math problems instead of imitating wishy-washy emotional humans. This point may be obvious to you, but apparently it wasn't obvious to Stross.

> If humans used easy instances, and they're the only example we know of that achieved I, how is that not weak evidence that AI through easy instances will pass through human-like I?

Humans are also the only animals that can play chess, but chessplaying software didn't pass through a human-like stage where they got nervous, forgetful, etc. My intuition says math can't be that radically different from chess (both involve search on trees with a complicated evaluation function), and we're only a handful of new insights from having computers decisively beat humans at math. And at that moment, by implication from my previous point, they might just also beat us at everything else :-) Remember that, on an absolute scale, humans are about as bad at math as you can be and still build a civilization (otherwise civilization would've happened at a lower level of development) and also that we probably suck at math because math is a conscious task (see Moravec's paradox).

Related link that should make you scared if you buy my reasoning: http://www.vetta.org/2009/09/monte-carlo-aixi/ .

There are lots of fallacies

Enhancements to primate evolutionary fitness are not much use to a machine, - Said who?

I strongly suspect that the hardest part of mind uploading won't be the mind part, but the body and its interactions with its surroundings. That's actually the easy part, the motor and sensory systems even in humans are largely deciphered.

Uploading implicitly refutes the doctrine of the existence of an immortal soul I thought this was refuted centuries ago, and anyway, it's a red herring.

our hard-wired biophilia will keep dragging us back to the real world, or to simulations indistinguishable from it Is the "real world" something stable? The same human brains performed great with both stone age cave living as well as modern megacity-life.

And so on and so on. The basic argument is "It is definately possible, but we may have reservations about it, ergo it's impossible"

Those aren't fallacies, those are merely points with which you disagree. The appropriate thing for you to do is provide contrary evidence.

a) Faulty genalization. Walking, sensing, thinking. Evolution gave them to us, and the machine would benefit from having these capacities, unless it would live in an alternate universe.

b) Stephen Hawking

c) False, soul is not a corporal thing [for those who believe in it], whatever the corpus.

d) We are limited by what we cannot perceive through our brains. We are "dragged back" by our inability to perceive higher intelligence, not because we 're lazy to adapt.

I don't buy the argument that we won't construct conscious AIs because they're not useful. Many of our most celebrated achievements don't have a direct practical use, yet that doesn't stop us from climbing mountains or sending rockets to the Moon.

Can you really imagine a group of scientists sitting around a large computer cluster and saying "Well, we could create the first sentient AI and ensure our names are enshrined in the history books, but why bother?"

Yeah, especially as round the world game coders already work since decades on getting more and more realistic behavior. Including stuff like sleep and having motivations of it's own which he seems to think no one is interested in coding. And game AI is already way better sponsored than nearly any other field of AI. So he is clearly wrong on that one.

Games also work as argument against his uploading argument that we are ill-equipped for living in virtual worlds. From all experience so far we _love_ living in virtual environments. There's already enough people which nearly ignore their bodies for hours and live in games like WoW instead.

We got to the moon because of massively political support at the highest levels because it was viewed as a strategic necessity.

Climbing mountains doesn't seem that comparable to going to the moon.

Scientists need funding in order to act if it requires many man years.

Thus military uses of AI are likely to be well funded to the tune of hundreds of millions if not billions because they can be viewed as a strategic necessity if it seems like the Chinese could possibly develop an AI before us. But if the general feeling is that a real AI isn't feasible in both Chinese and US circles in the near or medium term future, or there are more valuable/useful near and medium term objectives, there will not be a well funded race to create one.

Who said it needed to be well-funded? Creating a sentient AI is likely to become an easier undertaking as general computing technology and AI research advances. Creating such an AI in 20 or 30 years might require a large deal of funding, but what about in 50, 60 or even 100 years?

I don't think anyone can predict more than 20-30 years into the future with any real degree of accuracy.

So yeah, I agree that X might very well be possible (or in widespread usage) in 50 or 100 years, where X is basically anything that seems magical today.

So did that political support come from some Divine Providence or some conspiratory group? Didn't it arise from the curiosity of humans who elected the politicians?

Also, what about Art? What a useless waste of brainpower, yet we keep doing it for thousands of years.

The fact that humans have been expending valuable brain-power on art for millenia might suggest that it does have some use, or more broadly, that utility is not always obvious.

The whole debate is about whether you believe in transcendence and what you consider the mind to be.

Not transcendence in the Physics/Metaphysics sense but rather in the (at least to our knowledge) fact that dumb matter transcended into aware matter at one point.

I.e. life happened through transcendence from "dumb" matter into aware matter. Pattern recognizing feedback loops with memory that can reflect on our own existence.

I do not have the knowledge to determine the feasibility of the various methods but I do believe that the mind isn't a thing as such but rather a system that simulate a reality, the reality that we experience from our vantage point.

So to me the question is not as much whether we can transcend from one physical form to another but rather how we will connect with more and more external computation that again will mold our internal computation maybe even take over some parts. At least the IO can be replaced (eyes, ears etc.)

But if that can be replaced then what's to stop other areas? Nothing dictates that as far as we know right now.

Somehow the argument reminds me of the Searles (misguided) Chinese Room argument.

The fact is that we don't know whether it's possible. So why not just let those who think it is, work on a solution.

"I don't want my self-driving car to argue with me about where we want to go today"

The arguing is already happening. If you enter something in your navigation system and it gives you the wrong suggestions (completions).

Also read up on the filter bubble.

My favorite line -

And I certainly don't want to be sued for maintenance by an abandoned software development project.

...let's all hope it never comes to that!

For all I've joined in with criticizing Stross elsewhere in this thread, I really do think that technological change speeding up by vast amounts is unlikely because of how much harder it is to create each new generation of computers. If we were limited to 1960s technology the designing a new processor of today's complexity might very well take over a 100 years. For this reason I expect that even when its AIs running on ever faster computers we might see faster technological growth, but not radically faster technological growth (barring real algorithmic improvements which might or might not be possible).

The idea is that the things doing the designing are also hard at work redesigning themselves, presumably with a goal to get better at that, too. At least until intelligence reaches some sort of plateau, which would almost certainly be hit at some level way above human ability, it makes sense to assume that some sort of locally exponential or even super-exponential intelligence growth would occur.

That is, if humans are able to start the chain reaction and come up with something that's able to rewrite its own brain so that it's smarter than it started...a lump of plutonium that's not at critical mass is just going to sit there uselessly spewing out a slow trickle of neutrons, which is more or less what's happening with AI today.

Note: I only skimmed over the article. I've also thought about this subject, and about the reasons we haven't solved world hunger, aren't living on the moon, don't have people on Mars, aren't able to live for 200+ years and haven't reached the singularity. The one thing which retards technology, society and humanity as a whole is fear. Out of fear come politics, laws, armies, governments and wars. Fear is the thing that makes us want to solve all of our problems at once with as little thought as possible. It's what makes us "dumb lazy", which I define as short-terms laziness, as opposed to "smart lazy" which is doing a little more now in exchange for much less later. In other words, the bottleneck is the fear in each and every one of us. Once we get past this stage (either through genetic modification, technological augments, drugs, sheer willpower or a combination of the above), we will be living in a post-singularity world.

Here's my concise response to Stross:

http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2011/06/respo...

Michael Anissimov Singularity Institute

Truth be told, I've never been much interested in the concept of "uploading" consciousness. I find the concept of physical longevity (a la, Aubrey De Grey's research) to be more practical, achievable and desirable.

Ah, so you don't back up the files on your computer either?

Yes, I do, because when I lose files, I'm still alive to care about it. When I'm dead, I won't know better.

Yes, the point of copying yourself is the "not dying". Physical longevity won't do a whole lot against a roadside bomb.

Yes, the point of copying yourself is the "not dying".

Yes, and my point is that I don't really care about "not dying". I care about living a long time. Getting hit by a bus (or killed by a roadside bomb) doesn't bother me. Growing old and living for three decades in constant pain and discomfort does.

My main issue with the Singularity is the idea of exp-exp growth (growth that makes exponential look linear). Or am I misunderstanding things?

To repost a link from last discussion, there are three major schools of though on "The Singularity": http://singinst.org/blog/2007/09/30/three-major-singularity-...

All three of those "major schools" are just different stages of the same theory. Accelerating change leads to the intelligence explosion which leads to the event horizon (the actual singularity).

Actually, the point of "Accelerating Change" is that it doesn't lead to an intelligence explosion - change remains fairly predictable to the participants through the Singularity. And an event horizon can easily happen even with slow and constant change, it's compatible with the other two schools but doesn't depend on them.

You are suggesting that the superintelligence created by "Accelerating Change" does not operate with the same parameters as the superintelligence of the "Intelligence Explosion?"

The time when "Accelerating Change" no longer applies is the same time that the "Intelligence Explosion" and the "Event Horizon" occur or at least that's how it seems to me.

You nailed it with your first sentence there. The superintelligences created in an "Accelerating Change" scenario are subjectively a lot like gods. The first superintelligence created in the "Intelligence Explosion" scenario will be subjectively a lot like God.

Also, the point of the "Accelerating Change" scenario is that there isn't an intelligence exposion. The "Intelligence Explosion" scenario might or might not have a period of accelerating change before the intelligence explosion, but that doesn't make it the "Accelerating Change" scenario.

The article presents the view that, due to social inertia, artificial intelligence research will stop before it realizes its goal for ethical reasons. To my knowledge this has never happened before.

Tell that to any researcher trying to get US government funding for work using human embryonic stem cells.

Tell that to the German green party, who despite clearly wanting a carbon-neutral environmentally friendly economy are in the process of closing down Germany's nuclear reactor fleet.

(Etc.)

Sure, if AI actually requires some big beast of a codebase that would take thousands of man years to produce, with tons of interdependencies and a massively complicated architecture like an OS, it might be the kind of project that could be blocked by making sure no Big Money goes towards it.

But if, as some people suspect, it's something that can be solved by setting the right set of clever algorithms to work, running on twenty-years-out hardware, then the ethical problems that the public has with the endeavor will be irrelevant. Someone will just do it, ethics and regulations be damned, especially given the monumental potential rewards.

There are arguments that suggest that the actual algorithmic complexity of the "software" running on our brains is comparable to moderately complex software that humans routinely develop (even though the computational and "RAM" requirements of the "brain algorithm" are enormous), so I wouldn't discount the possibility that a small research group might be able to do the job without any serious level of financial support...

"The reason it's unlikely is that human intelligence is an emergent phenomenon of human physiology"

Physiology has as much to do with intelligence as electricity generation and distribution has to do with computer function. We humans are actors in a society, and that's how we measure intelligence. All that's needed is to be able to respond to social cues. Turing had it correct from the start. Don't get it twisted.

"If you thought the abortion debate was heated, wait until you have people trying to become immortal via the wire. "

Misleading. People are against abortion because how else are you going to punish those terrible terrible women for not staying at home and doing what their fathers and brothers tell them?!

I can understand strong arguments for and against abortion, but please don't mis-characterize your opponents reasoning. I've met and actually talked with strongly anti-abortion women (one is my mother, actually), and their reasoning has absolutely nothing to do with the anti-feminism/"traditional values". They feel that abortion is taking an innocent life, period.

Now, feel free to debate with them whether that is true or not, but don't lie about their reasoning.

That said, please, please, please keep these kind of topics off of hacker news. I've never seen abortion end in anything but a flame war.

I was going to make a comment, but I agree with your last sentence.

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