Eliezer, do you think AI is likely to be built, or emergent? I was thinking the other day that the internet (and the services and people who interact with it) are collectively gaining towards sentience: it has memory (archive.org), recall (search), self-awareness (various part of the internet inspecting the internet is like introspection), even something that you might call emotion, or motivation. It seems like an AI is as likely to emerge by accident, as an entity interacting and viewing it's environment (on the internet) as it is likely to be built from the ground up.
Dani: There are a number of papers discussing the emergence of a "global superbrain". You might be interested in the work of Francis Heylighen and the ECCO group at the VUB (Brussels).
Eliezer has repeatedly expressed his strong view that "emergence" is crap. You may not agree with it, but at least do a cursory search to see if he's already answered your question before you ask him.
