[jerf]

The problem is that all the evidence we have basically points to no for 1, and we have a big lack of evidence for 2. Self-evolving software is a thing that exists and I studied over a decade ago, which was already decades old, and it has not resulted in super intelligence.

[staunch]

What kind of evidence is there against #1?

For #2, we're at the very beginning of computing, so calling any technology impossible this early makes no sense.

[jerf]

"What kind of evidence is there against #1?"

All intelligence produced to date has had nothing like "morality" from anything I've seen, not even the basic seeds of it we can see in simple animals in the wild. There's even been some hand-wringing articles about it about AI-based approaches locking minorities out of loans and such, for instance. Certainly the military has not reported any problems to date with their AI research declining to kill people because they have moral problems with it, nor have any of the self-driving car teams reported that their job has been eased by the fact that the self-driving car AIs have spontaneously generated a sense of morality that makes them strive to not hit people.

Heck, the very idea that this would happen sounds downright silly when I say it.

I still say you're basically arguing from incredulity. You can't imagine an intelligence that isn't intrinsically human, therefore they can not exist. Plenty of the rest of us can imagine intelligences that aren't human. I say there's even some we live with, such as bureaucracies, that are super-intelligences composed of humans that still manage to have inhuman behaviors and pathologies; how much moreso an intelligence composed not of humans.

[staunch]

Chimps hunt down and kill monkeys for food. It's really hard for humans to watch but no chimp would ever even consider the ethics of this, even though they do have a level of ethics (e.g. fairness among themselves)

We're more intelligent than chimps, so we understand that monkeys are pretty evolved and suffer a lot when you eat them alive. Chimps aren't kept up at night by the screams of their victims.

A healthy human that tortures other intelligent lifeforms will often suffer severe mental anguish as a result. Only a human with a severe mental disorder can torture other lifeforms without remorse.

So what does that tell us about intelligence? That an intelligent understanding of a monkey's suffering leads to more ethical behavior.

But humans aren't that intelligent. We still let other people do unethical things on our behalf, like raising animals in terrible conditions for meat. The more intelligent (and knowledgeable) a human being, the more likely they are to have a problem with the suffering of factory farmed animals.

[eli_gottlieb]

>So what does that tell us about intelligence? That your understanding of a monkey's suffering leads you to more ethical behavior.

Rubbish. We don't empathize because we're intelligent. We empathize because we're empathetic. That's a specific mental capacity, separate from causal inference.