4 ms·

what I find interesting is that for most of my life, Moore's law was... as real as gravity; It seemed like any problem you had, wait a few years and you could

by lsc 8y ago

what I find interesting is that for most of my life, Moore's law was... as real as gravity; It seemed like any problem you had, wait a few years and you could just brute force it. The future really did look limitless. Now, moore's law has slowed down. Hell, I've got a 7 year old laptop next to me, and it still works for games. I mean, in the '90s, a 7 year old computer would be a museum piece. I mean, for big AI advances now, we're more and more dependent on software. Really, though, I think this seems to be how most tech works. There are periods of rapid innovation where it looks like you are going to the moon. Like, even spaceflight. In the years from 1944-1969 we went from the first practical rocket that could lob a bomb across the channel (without much accuracy, as i understand it) to actually putting human beings on the fucking moon. The literal moon. I mean, 1961-1969 might be even more amazing; vostock 1; the USSR sent Gagarin into outer space, and the US decided they needed to one-up them; so the US went to the moon. Aand... we kinda stopped after that. I mean, we sent out some probes and some robots, but like manned space flight has kinda petered out... and I still can't take a rocket if I want to go visit my buddies on the antipode and I don't want to spend all day in an airplane. Like, I can't buy a flight to Australia in under 12 hours for love or money, which probably is about what I'd say if it were 1969. (on the other hand, I can get said flight- round trip- for rather less than a day's pay for an Engineer, which is amazing, if you ask me.) And a lot of that is physics. Like, in most technologies, there's areas where progress is slow and hard and areas where once you break through some hard part, it becomes easy to advance... for a while. but that easy streak never lasts forever. Not because people are dumber or smarter, but because exponential progressions, in nature, rarely stay exponential very long. I guess I'm expressing doubt about the 'hard takeoff' just 'cause it seems to me like there is probably limits to how smart you can make a brain the same way that there are limits to how small you can make features on a silicon wafer. I'm not saying you won't be able to make a machine that is way smarter than me (or even way smarter than any human) - I'm just saying there are almost certainly limits.

pas 8y ago
Everyone seemed to dislike the movie Transcendence, but at least it handled the opening of pandora's box scenario well. Hard take off is not likely, simply because to go from a cat level intelligence to above human the resource requirements would be enormous. (If evolution needed hundreds of thousands of years, it's unlikely that a cat-level agent can do it that much faster without being noticed by a group of humans.) But humans like to play God, and also play with fire. It's just a matter of time to play with Skynet and oops it's really Skynet.
Jyaif 8y ago
> I'm just saying there are almost certainly limits. Nobody is saying that there's no limit, it's just that the limits may be super high. The most animals can lift is a couple of hundreds a kg by roughly one meter. Machines can move hundreds of time this amount to other planets.
- lsc 8y ago
  If we had AI that was as much smarter than us than we are than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees... assuming that physical limits kept that gap from widening, would you see that as this disastrous singularity? See, I always thought of the singularity, at least the hard takeoff as this idea that we'd come up with an ai that could make smarter copies of itself. Without any physical limits, that AI would get to the point where it was essentially infinitely smarter and infinitely more powerful than us. I personally see that as fundamentally different from the difference between humans and the higher animals. I mean, that's a big difference, sure, but it's certainly finite.
rawoke083600 8y ago
True ! But interesting for most ML problems.. Parallelism can greatly and easily improve performance... So if we wait a few years and get more cores/threads :)

by lsc 8y ago

pas 8y ago

Everyone seemed to dislike the movie Transcendence, but at least it handled the opening of pandora's box scenario well. Hard take off is not likely, simply because to go from a cat level intelligence to above human the resource requirements would be enormous. (If evolution needed hundreds of thousands of years, it's unlikely that a cat-level agent can do it that much faster without being noticed by a group of humans.) But humans like to play God, and also play with fire. It's just a matter of time to play with Skynet and oops it's really Skynet.

Jyaif 8y ago

> I'm just saying there are almost certainly limits. Nobody is saying that there's no limit, it's just that the limits may be super high. The most animals can lift is a couple of hundreds a kg by roughly one meter. Machines can move hundreds of time this amount to other planets.

lsc 8y ago
If we had AI that was as much smarter than us than we are than, say, dolphins or chimpanzees... assuming that physical limits kept that gap from widening, would you see that as this disastrous singularity? See, I always thought of the singularity, at least the hard takeoff as this idea that we'd come up with an ai that could make smarter copies of itself. Without any physical limits, that AI would get to the point where it was essentially infinitely smarter and infinitely more powerful than us. I personally see that as fundamentally different from the difference between humans and the higher animals. I mean, that's a big difference, sure, but it's certainly finite.

rawoke083600 8y ago

True ! But interesting for most ML problems.. Parallelism can greatly and easily improve performance... So if we wait a few years and get more cores/threads :)