Chapter 02 · 1999–2000
SL4 / Plan to Singularity
Shock Level Four and open-source seed AI
Overview
SL4 was for the people who were already at “Shock Level Four.” People who took the Singularity, Jupiter brains, and mental revision seriously, rather than treating them as sci-fi concepts.
Around the same time, Yudkowsky published The Plan to Singularity and The Singularitarian Principles. In both, he argued for developing seed AI openly, with the hope of setting off a broader AI industry that could reach superintelligence on an aggressively short timetable, somewhere around 2005 to 2010.
Predictions in this chapter
Seed AI by 2010, to outrace nanotech
1999 → 2010; falsified by events.
Nanotech ~2010; the Singularity ~2020
1999 → 2020; falsified by events.