Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky

It is perfectly all right for modern evolutionary biologists to explain just the patterns of living creatures, and not the “evolution” of stars or the “evolution” of technology. Alas, some unfortunate souls use the same word “evolution” to cover the naturally selected patterns of replicating life, and the strictly accidental structure of stars, and the intelligently configured structure of technology. And as we all know, if people use the same word, it must all be the same thing. We should automatically generalize anything we think we know about biological evolution to technology. Anyone who tells us otherwise must be a mere pointless pedant. It couldn’t possibly be that our ignorance of modern evolutionary theory is so total that we can’t tell the difference between a carburetor and a radiator. That’s unthinkable. No, the other person—you know, the one who’s studied the math—is just too dumb to see the connections.

The creationist/intelligent-design proponent's error of over generalizing.