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Tl;dr there are 7 billion artificial general intelligences in this world, and most of them are unemployed. Time and resources are the bottleneck to change and p
by ddxxdd 7y ago
Tl;dr there are 7 billion artificial general intelligences in this world, and most of them are unemployed. Time and resources are the bottleneck to change and progress, not intelligence.
I agree with this assessment, and I think this is a much better argument against AI danger than the ones I use (which boil down to unfalsifiability, violation of the laws of entropy, and a lack of astronomical evidence of celestial AGIs creating paperclip planets).
- bloak 7y agoI think I disagree. Even if it is for some reason impossible to make something that is more intelligent than a human (which seems implausible but I can't rule it out), it still might be possible to make something as intelligent as a human but which runs faster and can improve itself, and that would be enough to create the positive feedback that could lead to a sudden catastrophe.
- ddxxdd 7y agoDiscussions like this are interesting because the arguments on one side seem ridiculous, yet logically valid and simple to understand/articulate; the arguments on the other side are complex and difficult to formulate into words. I just got out of the shower, so I'll add my recent showerthought: In a human brain, each neuron is a CPU in and of itself; this means that every neuron in the human brain can run in parallel. In modern computers, the "perceptrons" are virtual, and there are only between 1 and 4 CPUs to allow activation of a specific "perceptron" at a given time. So if you have a biological brain with 100 billion neurons sitting next to a virtual brain with 100 billion perceptrons, the virtual brain will run 100 billion times slower even with equivalent intelligence.
- cobbzilla 7y agoI hear you on the parallelism, the flip side is that each neuron doesn’t need anywhere near the flexibility of a general purpose CPU. I think many of the AI algorithms can run on GPUs, where core counts can get into the thousands (still very far from millions). But these are largely independent — the interconnects between GPUs are not on the scale of neurons. My guess: we develop specialized hardware that, over time, will increasingly resemble organic brain structure.
- 0815test 7y ago"Core counts" on GPUs are quite misleading - what are called "cores" on GPU hardware would be called "execution units/ALU's" on the CPU. GPUs have significantly-enhanced memory throughput, and can use a combination of SIMD (with masked/predicated instructions), barrel processing and genuine multicore to excel at embarrassingly-parallel compute. But they're not magic. And if what you care about is running a wide variety of mainstream stats or machine learning algorithms, the "specialized hardware" you mention is the modern GPU, or something very much like it - I don't see any low-hanging fruit that might make some other HW architecture more feasible. Fixed-point compute might get there someday, but it's way too fiddly at present - it's not really clear how to "tweak" mainstream learning algorithms so as to dispense with the large dynamic range that floating point compute provides.
- raxxorrax 7y agoI think creating an AI that beats humans in IQ-Tests is way easier than creating one that is smarter than a human.
- afiori 7y ago> violation of the laws of entropy why? If I try to reconstruct argument I can only come up with reasoning that would show also evolution violates entropy laws.
- ddxxdd 7y agoAn AGI, connected to Micro-Electro-Mechanical switches, could learn to let hot air molecules into a box and cold air molecules out of that same box. But such an AGI would function as Maxwell's Demon, and would break the laws of thermodynamics if they didn't consume a certain amount of energy and give off a certain amount of waste heat in the process. So intelligence = entropy production and energy consumption, and so it cannot grow out of control and transform the planet overnight.
- afiori 7y agoThat is only true if you also assume an adiabatic AGI. There is nothing "intelligent" about an optical thermometer linked to a gate. The reason Maxwell's Demon cannot exist is that such a device would need to produce entropy
- ddxxdd 7y agoYes, and any intelligent device would also need to produce entropy and release heat. Which means that the level of intelligence an AGI can obtain is limited to Earth's energy input. And the impact that AGI has on the planet is also limited by Earth's natural processes. Which means that a hypothetical paperclip maximizer that turns humanity into paperclips and that becomes too intelligent to be turned off is a ridiculous scenario that ignores the potential limitations of an AGI.
- tlb 7y agoThat limit is extremely high. Total solar input to the earth is about 10^17 watts. Humans require about 100 watts to produce 1 brainpower -- if AGI is similarly efficient it could produce 10^15 brainpower, or 10,000 brainpower for every human. If 10,000 people's entire purpose in life was to turn you into paperclips, I don't think you could outrun them for long.
- vcavallo 7y ago“employment” or “usefulness” isn’t the threat.
- thundergolfer 7y agoAGI Co-learning changes the dynamic significantly. If human beings could co-learn, then I think the analogy to AGI would hold a lot better.