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THE QUESTION. “Is there good reason to believe that there will be an intelligence explosion?” https://lnkd.in/e335knp View in LinkedIn

EVOLUTION. “Remarkably, even though informative nucleic acid is absent, prions may undergo rapid adaptation and evolution in cloned cells and upon crossing the species barrier.” https://lnkd.in/d93kJqW View in LinkedIn

BY DESIGN. “The difference between chimpanzees and humans illustrates how powerful it can be to rewrite an agent’s cognitive algorithms. But, of course, the algorithm’s origin in this case was merely evolution, blind and stupid. An intelligent process with a bit of foresight can leap through the search space more efficiently. A human computer programmer can make innovations in a day that evolution couldn’t have discovered in billions of years.” https://lnkd.in/eFjahuP View in LinkedIn

UNIQUE SELECTION. “Prions are unique in that evolution and selection work at both the level of the chromosomal gene encoding the protein, and on the prion itself selecting prion variants.” https://lnkd.in/d4VfweY View in LinkedIn

THE OBSTACLE. “My own view is that the history of artificial intelligence suggests that the biggest bottleneck on the path to AI is software, not hardware: we have to find the right algorithms, and no-one has come close to finding them yet.” https://lnkd.in/e335knp View in LinkedIn

ON BALANCE. “Good (1965) predicts an ultraintelligent machine by 2000, Vinge (1993) predicts greater-than-human intelligence between 2005 and 2030, Yudkowsky (1996) predicts a singularity by 2021, and Kurzweil (2005) predicts human-level artificial intelligence by 2030. Speaking for myself, I would be surprised if there were human-level AI within the next three decades.” https://lnkd.in/e335knp View in LinkedIn

OTHER OPINIONS. “Still, it may be useful to note that none to few experts expect AI within five years, whereas many experts expect AI by 2050 or 2100.” https://lnkd.in/dAZH9Vg View in LinkedIn

ONE VIEW. “Machine intelligence will, more likely than not, appear within a century, even if the progress rate to date does not strongly suggest the next few decades.” http://intelligence.org/files/AIFoomDebate.pdf View in LinkedIn

SO ENDS this first of two weekends focused on prions. Can an aberrant host protein that evolves, has no DNA, and forms distinct strains be called a species, or even a separate life form? In the standard book of biology, the answer is no. Our understanding of life diversity is blindfolded by dogma, and if we want to find life beyond Earth, we had better wake up to what is under our very noses. View in LinkedIn

PRION STRAINS. “In support of the virino hypothesis is the existence of different strains of prions that cause differing patterns of disease and breed true; the existence of strains in pathogens is usually the result of changes in the nucleic acid sequence of the infectious agent.” https://lnkd.in/dkdVKcb View in LinkedIn