I don’t find this April Fool’s joke (2017) very funny. What are they parodying exactly?
Much funnier now that it's been explained to me. I certainly lack even human intelligence at some moments.
On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
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Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
We have natural “general” intelligence which appears to be generated by boring old chemical/thermal/electrical interactions. Why wouldn’t we be able to recreate that at some (IMO very far) point?
More than that: we have literally billions of examples of human-level intelligence right here on Earth. We have not a single example of teleportation, time travel, FTL, and other staples of not-very-science fiction. Guess what is more likely to be implemented.
Think about how difficult it would be to make a fly from scratch. Not editing the genes of an existing organism, but combining the raw chemical components into a form that's identical to a fly.
There are trillions of examples of insects on earth, but they do us no good when it comes to building one without using an evolved framework.
We've created a great number of things that had no natural analog. The internet, space travel, etc. I'd say our odds of doing something we haven't seen before are about even with artificially recreating a lot of things we see every day
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The human brain is estimated at 2.5 Pb of storage [0]. Assuming a "Moore's Law" like behavior of storage price, so that price halves every 2-3 years and assuming we use storage as a proxy for the space, access speed and computational power, the time it will take to have a $1000 computer that has the storage capacity of the brain will be in the 10-16 year time horizon. This puts the timeline to about 2029-2035. [0] ht…
It is not hard to create a RAID array with 2.5 Pb capacity. The trick of the human brain is that the "processing power" is enmeshed into the "memory", so the brain must have a colossal computational bandwidth, even with pretty slow neurons. I suppose that bandwidth is larger than that of most modern GPU / TPU clusters, which also don't feature anything comparable to 2.5Pb or RAM in their disposal. The revolution shou…
I think you missed the critical point: for $1000.
Feasibility is great but economic access is the aspect that I'm focusing on.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
The human brain is estimated at 2.5 Pb of storage [0]. Assuming a "Moore's Law" like behavior of storage price, so that price halves every 2-3 years and assuming we use storage as a proxy for the space, access speed and computational power, the time it will take to have a $1000 computer that has the storage capacity of the brain will be in the 10-16 year time horizon. This puts the timeline to about 2029-2035. [0] ht…
We DO have PB-grade storage facilities and they lack full AI. Moving the memory inside a single box instead of having interconnected devices is not going to bring AI just like that.
I think you missed the critical point: for $1000.
Feasibility is great but economic access is the aspect that I'm focusing on.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#75I’ve heard ideas[1] about supersized machines and they terrify me. Thankfully it is probably NP-hard in size to make a thing so we’re probably fine.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#76Makes me wonder: how's the HN community feeling these days about the actual plausibility / timeline of humans developing true AGI? Personally the more I learn about the current state of AI, and in comparison the way the human brain works, the more skeptical (and slightly disappointed) I tend to get.
I think that many people throwing their hat in the ring commenting on the unlikeliness of AGI are missing the impact of compounding effects. Yes, on a linear basis it's not going to happen anytime soon. But the trends in the space are developing around self-interacting discrete models to great effect (see OpenAI's Dall-E). The better and broader that systems manage to self-interact, the faster we're going to see impr…
The opposite of compounding effects are compounding difficulties. Computer science is full of problems where a multiplicative increase in effort results in an additive increase in output. We call these “exponentially hard” and they crop up annoyingly frequently. So one argument is that compounding improvements will result in linear increases in output because of exponential difficulty. The counter-argument is that many of these hard problems have good but not perfect solutions which may be found more efficiently.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#77Earlier quoted context omitted.
The human brain is estimated at 2.5 Pb of storage [0]. Assuming a "Moore's Law" like behavior of storage price, so that price halves every 2-3 years and assuming we use storage as a proxy for the space, access speed and computational power, the time it will take to have a $1000 computer that has the storage capacity of the brain will be in the 10-16 year time horizon. This puts the timeline to about 2029-2035. [0] ht…
In the past 10 years, I think we had a 8x increase in easily available storage going from 1TB drives being a $100 to a 16TB drive being roughly $250. So I would have to say that your time scale is way too optimistic at best.
I won't check your numbers and take them at face value.
Even with your numbers, that's a 6.4x decrease in price per TB (($100/1Tb) / ($250/16TB)), which is around 2.7 halvings over the course of 10 years, which is very close to my "2-3 years per halving" statement.
Even if it's slower than a halving in price per 2-3 years, 4-5 years say, this only delays my prediction by a decade or so.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#78In case anyone is wondering, we have made zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence. Zero . Unfortunately of course, the people who might have some of the skills needed to actually build such a thing (at the bricks and mortar level anyway), are nearly those people whose understanding of what intelligence actually is may be less than ideal. As a hint, it has nothing to do with passing…
Before we can commonly use a new noun, we need to fully fit its meaning in our limited working memory. So I believe there is a natural upper bound in human intelligence, for things that are beyond our brain power to get the full picture.
That must be why we haven't solved P = NP yet. This would take a person with twice the L1 cache to accomplish.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#79In case anyone is wondering, we have made zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence. Zero . Unfortunately of course, the people who might have some of the skills needed to actually build such a thing (at the bricks and mortar level anyway), are nearly those people whose understanding of what intelligence actually is may be less than ideal. As a hint, it has nothing to do with passing…
More to the point, we've also made no progress on supersizing existing unintelligent machines. In fact, machines have become dramatically smaller over the last several years.
If you look at the people who have the skills to make such machines larger, those who built bigger and better vacuum tubes and larger cathode displays with more oomph, they all appear to have disappeared, replaced by the misguided miniaturizers.
Your last point is already addressed in the paper, argument #3.
Re: On the Impossibility of Supersized Machines (2017)
#80In case anyone is wondering, we have made zero progress on anything even remotely resembling Artificial Intelligence. Zero . Unfortunately of course, the people who might have some of the skills needed to actually build such a thing (at the bricks and mortar level anyway), are nearly those people whose understanding of what intelligence actually is may be less than ideal. As a hint, it has nothing to do with passing…
I'd posit intelligence isn't what people make it out to be, and that we already have AI. People just aren't impressed by it when they learn the magic behind it, and hence disagree on that we have it.
I mean, people seem to hold human intelligence as something extraordinary, despite having no idea what precisely makes us intelligent. Isn't that kind of pulling the cart before the horse? For all we know, humans might just be biomechanical robots operating on the "stimuli" inputted to us, behaving in completely predictable ways, no different than how computers operate on the "data" inputted to them.