161–166 of 166 posts
There is too much easy money sloshing around Silicon Valley. The normal mechanisms for allocating it to sane, productive use (market forces) don't work, because it's in too few hands. So instead we get our version of a planned economy run by people who scared themselves with scifi.
There is too much easy money sloshing around Silicon Valley. The normal mechanisms for allocating it to sane, productive use (market forces) don't work, because it's in too few hands. So instead we get our version of a planned economy run by people who scared themselves with scifi.
It's akin to asking for investment because you intend to build a god.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Trying for agi could be part of a reasoned response to climate breakdown. But I am not going count on getting a reasoned response any time soon.
The reasoned response to climate breakdown is to start taking it seriously at a global level. AGI could help with that by culling humans, or at least seriously constraining human behavior. We're perfectly capable of doing that ourselves, although such behavior tends not to be popular. Realistic scenarios in which AGI solves climate change for us, in time, seem highly unlikely.
Agreed! That should be the number one priority.
I also agree that it is unlikely that AGI will fix climate change for us in time.
What it might help with is adaptation. If all our attempts in trying to control the giant intricate set of climatic and ecological feedback loops we are disturbing don't work, then it might help us with designing appropriate technologies to cope with what the world has become.
>‘Once we build a generally intelligent system, that basically we will ask it to figure out a way to make an investment return for you.' Maybe lets do curing cancer first?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I respectfully disagree. I realize whom I’m disagreeing with, but you’re wrong, there might be an asset bubble in the Valley, but these long term bets aren’t the result of “easy money.” They’re the result of smart money chasing long-term results in a world where research is being increasingly privatized and de-corporatized. Open AI is not that much different from the research driven labs of the past like the MIT AI L…
In my mind, OpenAI is different from the other labs you mention because their goal is to harness the power of their own god. Bell Labs, for most of its history, was tasked with improving the Bell System, so anything that was remotely related to the system was fair game. Maybe these things seem "not much different" to you, but they seem dramatically different to me. I'm not really that convinced anyone is substantiall…
Well, Douglas Hofstadter said back in the 80s that we'd first have to get a computer to know what the letters "A" and "I" are, and we've certainly achieved that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Going from 0 human-intelligence level pieces of software to 1 is the hardest part. Once you have 1, you can duplicate it as much as you want given resources. It can also be pointed inward to improve its own effectiveness. Actually, there are a lot of good arguments for logistic growth. The only ones for linear or sublinear I’ve heard are not strong and mostly take as an implicit assumption “those alarmists and their…
>It can also be pointed inward to improve its own effectiveness. Assumption. Intelligence (which isn’t defined) may be something that can grow without bound, or it may be something that plateaus just above the brightest human yet (again this is ill defined. “IQ is a number. There are numbers that are higher, so intelligence must be able to grow” is about as much thought as some people put into it) or maybe it is some…
There's pretty much no reason to believe capability peaks roughly above the brightest human.
Our brains aren't yet even integrated with hardware-optimized algorithm solvers on which to offload minimax or tree search problems, or solve simple game-theoretic situations, or any number of things a computer system is much better and faster at than a human.
It's just another one of those things that you can believe if you want to not spend time worrying about the ethics problem.