[gwern]

No, he's not, because George is interviewing Anissimov:

> Looking to learn more about this, I contacted futurist Michael Anissimov, a blogger at Accelerating Future and a co-organizer of the Singularity Summit. He’s given this subject considerable thought — and warns that we need to be just as wary of IA as we are AI.

Notice the bolding of questions and then responses throughout the bulk of the article.

(Incidentally, Anissimov was perma-banned from Twitter the other day, apparently. That takes some doing if you're not gushing about ISIS.)

[Moshe_Silnorin]

Yeah. I noticed that afterwords. I had only skimmed the first paragraph of the article when I posted the comment. I'm not a fan of Anissimov, I haven't been since I saw him speak very naively about whole brain emulation in 2005 and later when he made some very technically incompetent arguments for some imagined form of nanotechnological DRM. Even in this case, brain augmentation strikes me as heroically unpromising. Once we know enough to augment a brain, I think we will know enough to create superior substitutes - though an obvious exception to this would be genetic augmentations.

However, his bizarre politics are entirely beside the point. And talking about politics in technical conversations is a very bad cultural practice.