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Sure. Question is: how many other discoveries await today such that we, collectively, as a species, already have all the puzzle pieces, but haven't yet put them

Sure. Question is: how many other discoveries await today such that we, collectively, as a species, already have all the puzzle pieces, but haven't yet put them together? An AI as smart as your average grad student, but which somehow could retain in mind at the same time all of our accumulated scientific knowledge, might be able to quickly draw all sorts of seemingly brilliant conclusions. Now imagine its reasoning process works 6 to 7 orders of magnitude faster than ours, even if not qualitatively different in its logic or biases. Dunno, I don't really believe we are that close to building that sort of AI, but it doesn't seem fundamentally impossible, and it does seem like it could do things that to us would look as "more intelligent" than us. It might in the end be better at creating scientific knowledge in the way current computers are better than us at solving arithmetic: faster and capable of holding more in memory, rather than following any qualitatively different process. But even that would be enough.

Retric 9y ago
IMO, few major ones. We have billions of man years of research and things are better than before that period, but diminishing returns are real. Don't get me wrong I think it would be useful, just that the gap from human level AI to 1,000x human AI is simply not that huge. Let's say you moved someone from 2006 to 2016 or even from 1996. Yea sure there is real progress, but not really. We have better drugs in terms of AIDS for example, but we are worse off in terms of antibiotics. Game graphics have improved, but quake is from 1996 so we already had real 3D first person shooters and gameplay is not that different. Hell FTP is arguably worse. Further that's 20 years so we are talking literally millions-man years of effort and trillions of dollars worth of R&D for not much. In terms of machines the SR-71 is still the fastest manned aircraft, no supersonic passenger aircraft. Tallest building is much taller, but lacks much space on the top floors making it more monument than utility as the sears tower has more useable space and a smaller footprint.
- TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
  Invention proceeds because of game-changing insights. Maxwell's equations were a game changer. So were Newton's laws. So were Relativity and QM. Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since. There's been a lot of application, but no game-changing deep theoretical insights. Quantum computing may - should? - eventually throw up something new. It's going to have to. If it doesn't I think we're going to be stuck with much less progress than we're expecting.
  - jacquesm 9y ago
    > Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since. Quantity when the difference is large enough becomes quality. The 9 orders of magnitude or so that computers have gone through in storage capacity and speed definitely count as a game-changer.
  - adrianN 9y ago
    The insight that all problems in NP are basically the same was a game changer in complexity theory (it basically started the whole field).
nradov 9y ago
Except that a lot of our accumulated scientific knowledge is simply wrong due to experimental errors, fraud, selective publishing, and random false positives. See the whole reproducibility crisis. It's conceivable that someone could construct a special-purpose AI which isn't superhuman but uses advanced ML and NLP algorithms to mine the scientific literature for previously unnoticed implications and relationships between seemingly unrelated articles. But I expect that would only give a suggested starting point for human researchers to formulate hypotheses and design experiments.

Retric 9y ago

IMO, few major ones. We have billions of man years of research and things are better than before that period, but diminishing returns are real. Don't get me wrong I think it would be useful, just that the gap from human level AI to 1,000x human AI is simply not that huge. Let's say you moved someone from 2006 to 2016 or even from 1996. Yea sure there is real progress, but not really. We have better drugs in terms of AIDS for example, but we are worse off in terms of antibiotics. Game graphics have improved, but quake is from 1996 so we already had real 3D first person shooters and gameplay is not that different. Hell FTP is arguably worse. Further that's 20 years so we are talking literally millions-man years of effort and trillions of dollars worth of R&D for not much. In terms of machines the SR-71 is still the fastest manned aircraft, no supersonic passenger aircraft. Tallest building is much taller, but lacks much space on the top floors making it more monument than utility as the sears tower has more useable space and a smaller footprint.

TheOtherHobbes 9y ago
Invention proceeds because of game-changing insights. Maxwell's equations were a game changer. So were Newton's laws. So were Relativity and QM. Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since. There's been a lot of application, but no game-changing deep theoretical insights. Quantum computing may - should? - eventually throw up something new. It's going to have to. If it doesn't I think we're going to be stuck with much less progress than we're expecting.
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > Church-Turing was also a game changer. But I don't think there's been anything equivalent in computing since. Quantity when the difference is large enough becomes quality. The 9 orders of magnitude or so that computers have gone through in storage capacity and speed definitely count as a game-changer.
- adrianN 9y ago
  The insight that all problems in NP are basically the same was a game changer in complexity theory (it basically started the whole field).

nradov 9y ago

Except that a lot of our accumulated scientific knowledge is simply wrong due to experimental errors, fraud, selective publishing, and random false positives. See the whole reproducibility crisis. It's conceivable that someone could construct a special-purpose AI which isn't superhuman but uses advanced ML and NLP algorithms to mine the scientific literature for previously unnoticed implications and relationships between seemingly unrelated articles. But I expect that would only give a suggested starting point for human researchers to formulate hypotheses and design experiments.