Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI

A controller/overseer can easily limit/block this sufficiently and securely. Were talking about hardware/software. There are systems/standardized approaches to solving this problem. The 'Control/Safety' problem for AI are lauded as theoretical and new. However, they are not. They are solved by industry standard approaches day in and out. Any seasoned/experienced engineer in this field could solve this with known approaches.

> Since an AGI can copy itself and be available at a multitude of access points at once

Same comment above applies. This can only occur if done by a controller/overseer. Real-life isn't a sci-fi movie... There's engineering involved.

> AGI changing x,y,z

Not possible unless it is given access. Solved easily in industry standard ways.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_general_intelligenc...

(I do not believe anyone has solved that. Ref: A talk by Prof. Stuart Russell, AAAI fellow and author of the standard textbook on AI: https://www.ted.com/talks/stuart_russell_3_principles_for_cr...)

[1] Note that there are incentives for at least some groups to develop a highly capable AGI with the characteristics I describe.

> Time is still required like with all things.

I agree that time is required but an AGI can multiply itself and collect all requisite information from the world quite quickly. There is so much available to learn just from the Internet if it knows how to learn independently like humans do. Computational resources might be a bottleneck but presumably a human-level AGI can at least do online work at a minimum wage (e.g. translating documents, simple accounting, ...). It can parallelly execute many 'brains' to accomplish more work to acquire more resources, to do more work profitably....

Humans are limited by 24 hours a day. An AGI can over a fairly short amount of time (months) accumulate sufficient resources to make thousands or millions of its copies perhaps with variations to specialize for different kinds of work. Over time, it should gain experience to perform more and more highly-valued work as well.

> A game with disadvantaged players. A game with incomplete information. A game whose rules/dynamics change frequently to suit inside players.

A smart AGI can form alliance and share benefits with inside players and execute any cunning strategies not available to humans who at least need to take into account law enforcement. There are many other advantages an AGI has over human organizations (some of which I mentioned above).

I'll instead give you something to consider : * The totality of mathematics is not fully defined. As such, there are can be completely new mathematics that destroys previous conceptions especially as it relates to the limits of computability. Theoretical Limits often reflect one's limited scope of perception. Your limits or the limits someone theorized ages ago aren't necessarily my limits if I find a path beyond them.

Information theory and computational complexity theory are theories... Solving fundamental aspects of intelligence will invalidate a host of theories, create new mathematics, new algorithms, and new theories. Continuing to frame something as ground breaking as an understanding/implementation of intelligence in yester-years theoretical limits is flawed.

First, AlphaZero still makes use of a Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to search for good moves. MCTS is a powerful algorithm with a very limited scope: zero-sum, perfect information games. So for instance, it would be very difficult to see how to use MCTS-based AlphaZero in, e.g., training self-driving cars.

Second, the AlphaZero architecture is precisely mapped onto a checkerboard and will not learn anything about games that don't use a checkerboard, or any situation that is not possible to model as a game played on a checkerboard.

Third, the AlphaZero architecture is also precisely mapped onto the range of moves of pieces in chess, shoggi and go. Again, AlphaZero would be useless in any game that used pieces with different moves (e.g. a piece with a zig-zag move, or a piece allowed to move in spirals etc).

All of the above of course can be mitigated with different architectural choices, but to make those choices, implement them and validate them will take a great deal of time.

So, AlphaZero doesn't mean we're closer to _general_ AI. Quite the contrary: it's a very specialised form of AI that will be very difficult to use in any different task than chess, shoggi or go.