Foom Debate, Again

My ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky last June: I worry about conversations that go into “But X is like Y, which does Z, so X should do reinterpreted-Z”. Usually, in my experience, that goes into what I call “reference class tennis” or “I’m taking my reference class and going home”. The trouble is that there’s an unlimited number of possible analogies and reference classes, and everyone has a different one. I was just browsing old LW posts today (to find a URL of a quick summary of why group-selection arguments don’t work in mammals) and ran across a quotation from Perry Metzger to the effect that so long as the laws of physics apply, there will always be evolution, hence nature red in tooth and claw will continue into the future – to him, the obvious analogy for the advent of AI was “nature red in tooth and claw”, and people who see things this way tend to want to cling to that analogy even if you delve into some basic evolutionary biology with math to show how much it isn’t like intelligent design. For Robin Hanson, the one true analogy is to the industrial revolution and farming revolutions, meaning that there will be lots of AIs in a highly competitive economic situation with standards of living tending toward the bare minimum, and this is so absolutely inevitable and consonant with The Way Things Should Be as to not be worth fighting at all. That’s his one true analogy and I’ve never been able to persuade him otherwise. For Kurzweil, the fact that many different things proceed at a Moore’s Law rate to the benefit of humanity means that all these things are destined to continue and converge into the future, also to the benefit of humanity. For him, “things that go by Moore’s Law” is his favorite reference class.