In late 2008, an extensive and long-awaited debate about the Technological Singularity occurred on Overcoming Bias, mainly between Robin Hanson and Eliezer Yudkowsky. It focused on the likelihood of hard AI takeoff ("FOOM"), the need for a theory of Friendliness, and the future of AGI, whole brain emulation, and recursive self-improvement in general. A stand-up debate on the same themes took place at Jane Street Capital in June 2011, and Hanson made a further post in 2014.

See Also

The best resource for most readers new to the debate will be MIRI's 2013 The Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom Debate eBook, available in PDF, EPUB, and MOBI formats. This includes

the original series of blog posts,
a transcript of the 2011 debate
Kaj Sotala's summary and analysis of the debate, and
a 2013 technical report on AI takeoff dynamics (“intelligence explosion microeconomics”) written by Yudkowsky.

Prologue

Main sequence

Conclusion

Postscript

Jane Street debate

A stand-up debate between Hanson and Yudkowsky on the same themes took place on Wednesday June 30 2011 at Jane Street Capital.

Video with better quality audio 1.57G
~~Poor quality WMA audio~~ 97M (dead link)
~~Poor quality MP3 audio~~ 97M (dead link)
Full transcript
Partial transcript by Chris Hallquist

Summary and analysis

In Spring 2012 Luke Muehlhauser asked Kaj Sotala to write a summary and analysis of the debate; he made a draft of that analysis available in November 2012. The final version of the summary is included in the ebook.

Post-book material

Not included in MIRI's 2013 book on the debate:

Robin Hanson's 2014 blog post on the subject in response to the publication of "Superintelligence", I Still Don’t Get Foom
Katja Grace's 2014 hosted discussion on Less Wrong, Superintelligence 6: Intelligence explosion kinetics
Eliezer's 2017 post, AlphaGo Zero and the Foom Debate and Robin Hanson's reply, What Evidence Is AlphaGo Zero Re AGI Complexity?

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