Note that Hans Moravec, an Austrian-born roboticist, came up with essentially the same idea back in the 1990s. Bostrom was very familiar with Moravec’s work, so it’s likely he encountered it prior to 2003, but then forgot it by the time he made his rediscovery.
“Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke,[1] not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.”
I haven’t read Moravec’s book very thoroughly, but I ctrl+f’d for “simulation” and couldn’t see anything very explicitly discussing the idea that we might be living in a simulation. There are a number of instances where Moravec talks about running very detailed simulations (and implying that these would be functionally similar to humans). It’s possible (quite likely?) Bostrom didn’t ever see the 1995 article where Moravec “shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious.”
Either way, it seems true that (1) the idea itself predates Bostrom’s discussion in his 2003 article, (2) Bostrom’s discussion of this specific idea is more detailed than Moravec’s.
Bostrom (2003) cited Moravec (1988), but not for this specific idea—it’s only for the idea that “One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.”
But yeah, his answer to the question “How did you come up with this?” in the 2008 article I linked to in the original post seems misleading, because he doesn’t mention Moravec at all and implies that he came up with the idea himself.
Oh, nice, thanks very much for sharing that. I’ve cited Moravec in the same research report that led me to the Bostrom link I just shared, but hadn’t seen that article and didn’t read Mind Children fully enough to catch that particular idea.
Note that Hans Moravec, an Austrian-born roboticist, came up with essentially the same idea back in the 1990s. Bostrom was very familiar with Moravec’s work, so it’s likely he encountered it prior to 2003, but then forgot it by the time he made his rediscovery.
It’s quite common:
“Cryptomnesia occurs when a forgotten memory returns without its being recognized as such by the subject, who believes it is something new and original. It is a memory bias whereby a person may falsely recall generating a thought, an idea, a tune, a name, or a joke,[1] not deliberately engaging in plagiarism but rather experiencing a memory as if it were a new inspiration.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryptomnesia
I haven’t read Moravec’s book very thoroughly, but I ctrl+f’d for “simulation” and couldn’t see anything very explicitly discussing the idea that we might be living in a simulation. There are a number of instances where Moravec talks about running very detailed simulations (and implying that these would be functionally similar to humans). It’s possible (quite likely?) Bostrom didn’t ever see the 1995 article where Moravec “shrugs and waves his hand as if the idea is too obvious.”
Either way, it seems true that (1) the idea itself predates Bostrom’s discussion in his 2003 article, (2) Bostrom’s discussion of this specific idea is more detailed than Moravec’s.
Bostrom (2003) cited Moravec (1988), but not for this specific idea—it’s only for the idea that “One estimate, based on how computationally expensive it is to replicate the functionality of a piece of nervous tissue that we have already understood and whose functionality has been replicated in silico, contrast enhancement in the retina, yields a figure of ~10^14 operations per second for the entire human brain.”
But yeah, his answer to the question “How did you come up with this?” in the 2008 article I linked to in the original post seems misleading, because he doesn’t mention Moravec at all and implies that he came up with the idea himself.
Oh, nice, thanks very much for sharing that. I’ve cited Moravec in the same research report that led me to the Bostrom link I just shared, but hadn’t seen that article and didn’t read Mind Children fully enough to catch that particular idea.