A significant architectural
limitation of the writings of
Elizer Yudkowsky is that they are damn
near impossible to quote, thanks to their cumulative nature. He'll
write about
optimization
processes, then the
blind
idiot god that is evolution, then a
million
different
unrelated
topics; and it's all very low level and unsurprising, but he'll
then write something surprising and interesting that is built on
all those previous posts, and is completely incomprehensible
outside of that context.
The Standard Blog Format is: witty title, source link,
blockquote,
analysis/commentary. Most of
Etc is of this
format, with a scattering in other categories. You can shuffle the
individual elements, but you can't outright axe any of them without
breaking the format.
So it's damn near impossible to blog about anything he writes
without putting in either mountains of context text and scaring
people off, (
slash boring them to death) or sticking in a
few dozen links (as I just did) and hoping your readers follow them
before jumping right to the quote and getting confused.
So if some topic comes up that tangently touches on an area of
Elizer's work, you end up talking in uselessly broad
generalizations
* and abjectly failing to get the point
across. This is the same mechanism by which I have apparently
convinced a friend that Elizer is a
Singularlity nutbag. Don't get me wrong, any word as stupidly
broad as "the Singularity" will accumulate all sorts of
weird
shit, but Elizer doesn't fall under that category.
I got onto this topic in the first place, because I was writing
something (unfortunately unpublishable, being fanfiction) a few
days ago that tangentially touched on weakly-superhuman AI, and I
needed to compactly describe the topic. I muddled along, of course,
but it would have been nice to been able to rip off a key
paragraph, say, this one:
If the
AI is weak, it does nothing, because it is not powerful enough to
significantly improve itself - like telling a chimpanzee to rewrite
its own brain.
If the AI is powerful enough to rewrite itself in a way that
increases its ability to make further improvements, and this
reaches all the way down to the AI's full understanding of its own
source code and its own design as an optimizer... then even if the
graph of "optimization power in" and "optimized product out" looks
essentially the same, the graph of optimization over time is going
to look completely different from Earth's history so
far.
I've got jack-all motivation to go back and polish it, of course.
This, in case you care, happens all the damn time. I'll get a idea
riding my ass, dash off a couple of paragraphs, then never touch it
again. Occasionally I can salvage it, like with what became
TWI;
and sometimes I can salvage these fragments for completely
different stories, but most of the time they gather dust.
Publishing them
on
their own tends to inspire bile and vitriol; since they
obviously are meant to go somewhere but don't provide closure, so I
can't do that either. The worst case scenario is for me to die
without fleshing
any of them out, then have the executors
of my will delete them.
*You can call Elizer "an AI researcher who sometimes writes about
the Singularity" in much the same way you can call me "a
custodian
** who sometimes writes science fiction".
** Explaining this, while thematically inappropriate (it ruins the
structure of the simile) is necessary to sooth my enormous ego.
Plus, it's my blog, nyah ha ha ha. My job title, "Lighting fixture
maintenance technician" is a resume friendly synonym for "light
bulb changer", which also can be taken to mean "someone who
maintains a building", which is a notational definition of the word
"custodian". Feel free to laugh uproariously at the freshly
explained humor; or rather, smirk appreciatively at the complicated
literary device.
Speaking of the Singularity, it is amusing to note that damn near
all of the "Singularity fiction" is actually
"
Pre-Singularity fiction", since the point of the
singularity is that technology will progress too quickly to
extrapolate. Thus, it is impossible for anything that even remotely
takes itself seriously to be set
during the Singularity.
The
Continuity series, like
most singularity fiction, is set in the pre-singularity period;
with the odd exception of stuff like Vinge's
Marooned in
Realtime, which is actually set
after the singularity,
and consists mostly of people walking around, going, "What the hell
just happened?"
That Which Is, The Face Upon the Deep, and the non-canon
Internation are set during the wacky transition to a
MNT
economy. She was just just the dry smell of gasoline and Coarse
Adjustment are set in the post-war period, and thus have hardly any
interesting violence, as well as much less bombastic titles.