6 ms·

In 1900 the earth’s population was 1.6 billion. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first tim

In 1900 the earth’s population was 1.6 billion. In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first time. That was in the span of 50 years. 22 years later, we were on the moon. A lot can happen in 50-70 years. We now have 7 billion people, with more of the world coming online to do R&D. China, specifically, has made it a goal to lead the world in AI by 2025. India’s economy should grow over the next 2 decades and they will also become a world leader. With so many resources, the world should easily advance more in the next 50 than it did in the last 100 years.

zxwx 6y ago
In 70 years of physics we went from the photoelectric effect to the Standard Model. But for the last 50ish, it remains the standard. 70 years from the first flight to the concorde and the saturn 5. But in the 50 years since, improvements in aerospace have been incremental. In 75 years we went from ENIAC to TFLOPS in a laptop. But looks like that breakneck pace is slowing down sharply. We've been doing AI nearly as long, and have gone from say, Eliza to GPT-3. A huge advance, but not AGI. A lot can happen in 50 years, but we've already had our first 70ish years with AI without an AGI breakthrough. To the definition of AGI in the link, maybe a hundred million data scientists can hone a million models, one per "economically viable" task, and start chipping away at the 95% of the economy target, but till now I'd wager AI has put many more people to work than out of it.
- dwaltrip 6y ago
  You have a good point. However, to be a bit pedantic, fully reusable rockets, which we are very much knocking on the door of, are a major stepwise improvement. It just goes to show that technological advancement can happen rather unpredictably.
300bps 6y ago
When I was 14, I was 6'5". Extrapolating that out, I should probably be 100' tall by now.
- paulcole 6y ago
  brb writing a pointless think piece about why I am 90% sure that will happen by 2070
nitwit005 6y ago
In the 50s and 60s aviation and space people often thought that things would keep improving exponentially, as they'd lived through such incredible advancements. Instead things slowed enormously, despite vast efforts put in. We've lived through enormous computing advances, but it's been fairly obvious for some time that hardware improvements are slowing. I'm sure there will be amazing advancements in the next 50 years, but I expect a lot of the progress to be in fields that are either currently unknown, or seem unimportant today. Those new fields will see better return on investment.
- api 6y ago
  > despite vast efforts put in. I disagree with that part. Things slowed dramatically because we stopped putting extreme amounts of effort in, largely because there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology... for a while.
  - nradov 6y ago
    The worldwide market for aviation and space launches is far larger now than in the 1970s.
    - jjoonathan 6y ago
      > there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology
- fiblye 6y ago
  Funding for NASA also dropped off a cliff and no government really cared about going to space anymore, and there was zero company out there with the funds and motivation to go to space. Now we have countless companies and several countries all competing and building off each other's work in the AI space. So long as people don't get bored or the global economy doesn't collapse, progress should keep chugging along. Another key difference is that it's basically free to get into. Anyone out there can download data sets, existing algorithms, and get to work on tweaking things. There's a strong foundation for any motivated person to build off of.
Thorentis 6y ago
Putting AGI in the same field as population growth and flight is disingenuous. They are entirely different things, and the rapid advancement of one means absolutely nothing about the advancement or even possibility of the other. Overcoming physical limitations is one thing. An intelligent being creating something equally or more as intelligent as itself? And obviously I don't mean reproducing. Creating an entirely new class of thing which has intelligence equal to the creator is very different to using the forces of nature to give you an edge over gravity.
- melling 6y ago
  The point with the population is that we will have 7-9 billion people, with more people doing research, engineering, etc. how many scientists were there in 1900? We will figure out how the brain works, make better transistors, develop better algorithms, etc An AI “space race” between the US and China, for instance, will push the field forward over the next decade.
  - TaylorAlexander 6y ago
    Collaboration also pushes this field forward. Lots of great AI research coming from China and the US and luckily lots of it is shared openly. IMO that’s how to maximize the rate of innovation.
  - sheepdestroyer 6y ago
    Did you miss the news where average IQ is lowering across the board due to various poorly understood factors (increase of CO2 levels, endocrine disruptors, etc...). We are getting at a massive amount of dumb people ala idiocracy, not sure if that also means more smart scientists in total.
    - lostmsu 6y ago
      If there's a drop in IQ, right now it is not even comparable to the population rise.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
mempko 6y ago
You forgot about global warming and that we are in the sixth mass extinction. Global civilization collapsing in 50 years seems as likely as AGI.
loosetypes 6y ago
Improving performance for a metric that we actually know how to quantify is fundamentally different than calling interesting but potentially one-off stabs as incremental progress. Conflating them only demonstrates how far we have to go.
- unishark 6y ago
  We do know how to quantify intelligence (unless you're one of those who includes consciousness in the definition of AGI, which seems almost religious to me). I expect it will quickly switch to an argument of what deficiencies AGI candidates have and how smart they really are, much like ML models that supposedly beat humans at narrow tasks today, rather than possible versus impossible talk. As for impossible talk, we have biological examples all around us of what needs to be built. We just need to imitate. Much like computer vision, algorithms sucked at it until they didn't (and all it took was someone scaling up an old design idea plus a lot of data). On the scale of gigantic ambitious goals it's pretty special in that regard. Curing cancer or death or mars colonies may indeed be impossible, by contrast. I will agree that I trust no one's ability to predict anything. They are all just making almost-entirely-uneducated guess using a few variables out of some vast number of unknowns.
  - visarga 6y ago
    > unless you're one of those who includes consciousness in the definition of AGI Why stick with this concept - consciousness - which is not well defined, instead of using a much more practical concept: embodiment. Embodiment is the missing link towards human level AI. Agents embodied in a world, like AlphaGO, already surpass humans (on the Go board or Dota 2), we just need to take that ability to real world. The source of meaning is in the game, not the brain. What we need is a better simulator of the world, or a neural technique for imagination in RL, which is under works [1]. 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.05960.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.05960.pdf
  - loosetypes 6y ago
    Thanks for the reply. > We do know how to quantify intelligence (..). But how exactly do we do that?
littlestymaar 6y ago
> In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first time. And since then, not much has changed. Commercial supersonic flight never took off, and nowadays planes still use turbofans (invented during WWII). Engineering fields commonly make many breakthrough in a really short time, and then settle down for a long period. We can't predict how far IA progress will go. In the 50s, having flying cars by 2000 didn't sound unrealistic given how much flight advanced during the first half of the century. Yet, I don't think anyone nowadays believes we'll have them by 2100. Also, between Da Vinci's Codex of the flight of birds (1502) and the Wright brothers flight, there has been four centuries. And regarding AGI, we might be closer to Da Vinci then to the Wright.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

zxwx 6y ago

In 70 years of physics we went from the photoelectric effect to the Standard Model. But for the last 50ish, it remains the standard. 70 years from the first flight to the concorde and the saturn 5. But in the 50 years since, improvements in aerospace have been incremental. In 75 years we went from ENIAC to TFLOPS in a laptop. But looks like that breakneck pace is slowing down sharply. We've been doing AI nearly as long, and have gone from say, Eliza to GPT-3. A huge advance, but not AGI. A lot can happen in 50 years, but we've already had our first 70ish years with AI without an AGI breakthrough. To the definition of AGI in the link, maybe a hundred million data scientists can hone a million models, one per "economically viable" task, and start chipping away at the 95% of the economy target, but till now I'd wager AI has put many more people to work than out of it.

dwaltrip 6y ago
You have a good point. However, to be a bit pedantic, fully reusable rockets, which we are very much knocking on the door of, are a major stepwise improvement. It just goes to show that technological advancement can happen rather unpredictably.

300bps 6y ago

When I was 14, I was 6'5". Extrapolating that out, I should probably be 100' tall by now.

paulcole 6y ago
brb writing a pointless think piece about why I am 90% sure that will happen by 2070

nitwit005 6y ago

In the 50s and 60s aviation and space people often thought that things would keep improving exponentially, as they'd lived through such incredible advancements. Instead things slowed enormously, despite vast efforts put in. We've lived through enormous computing advances, but it's been fairly obvious for some time that hardware improvements are slowing. I'm sure there will be amazing advancements in the next 50 years, but I expect a lot of the progress to be in fields that are either currently unknown, or seem unimportant today. Those new fields will see better return on investment.

api 6y ago
> despite vast efforts put in. I disagree with that part. Things slowed dramatically because we stopped putting extreme amounts of effort in, largely because there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology... for a while.
- nradov 6y ago
  The worldwide market for aviation and space launches is far larger now than in the 1970s.
  - jjoonathan 6y ago
    > there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology
fiblye 6y ago
Funding for NASA also dropped off a cliff and no government really cared about going to space anymore, and there was zero company out there with the funds and motivation to go to space. Now we have countless companies and several countries all competing and building off each other's work in the AI space. So long as people don't get bored or the global economy doesn't collapse, progress should keep chugging along. Another key difference is that it's basically free to get into. Anyone out there can download data sets, existing algorithms, and get to work on tweaking things. There's a strong foundation for any motivated person to build off of.

Thorentis 6y ago

Putting AGI in the same field as population growth and flight is disingenuous. They are entirely different things, and the rapid advancement of one means absolutely nothing about the advancement or even possibility of the other. Overcoming physical limitations is one thing. An intelligent being creating something equally or more as intelligent as itself? And obviously I don't mean reproducing. Creating an entirely new class of thing which has intelligence equal to the creator is very different to using the forces of nature to give you an edge over gravity.

melling 6y ago
The point with the population is that we will have 7-9 billion people, with more people doing research, engineering, etc. how many scientists were there in 1900? We will figure out how the brain works, make better transistors, develop better algorithms, etc An AI “space race” between the US and China, for instance, will push the field forward over the next decade.
- TaylorAlexander 6y ago
  Collaboration also pushes this field forward. Lots of great AI research coming from China and the US and luckily lots of it is shared openly. IMO that’s how to maximize the rate of innovation.
- sheepdestroyer 6y ago
  Did you miss the news where average IQ is lowering across the board due to various poorly understood factors (increase of CO2 levels, endocrine disruptors, etc...). We are getting at a massive amount of dumb people ala idiocracy, not sure if that also means more smart scientists in total.
  - lostmsu 6y ago
    If there's a drop in IQ, right now it is not even comparable to the population rise.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]

mempko 6y ago

You forgot about global warming and that we are in the sixth mass extinction. Global civilization collapsing in 50 years seems as likely as AGI.

loosetypes 6y ago

Improving performance for a metric that we actually know how to quantify is fundamentally different than calling interesting but potentially one-off stabs as incremental progress. Conflating them only demonstrates how far we have to go.

unishark 6y ago
We do know how to quantify intelligence (unless you're one of those who includes consciousness in the definition of AGI, which seems almost religious to me). I expect it will quickly switch to an argument of what deficiencies AGI candidates have and how smart they really are, much like ML models that supposedly beat humans at narrow tasks today, rather than possible versus impossible talk. As for impossible talk, we have biological examples all around us of what needs to be built. We just need to imitate. Much like computer vision, algorithms sucked at it until they didn't (and all it took was someone scaling up an old design idea plus a lot of data). On the scale of gigantic ambitious goals it's pretty special in that regard. Curing cancer or death or mars colonies may indeed be impossible, by contrast. I will agree that I trust no one's ability to predict anything. They are all just making almost-entirely-uneducated guess using a few variables out of some vast number of unknowns.
- visarga 6y ago
  > unless you're one of those who includes consciousness in the definition of AGI Why stick with this concept - consciousness - which is not well defined, instead of using a much more practical concept: embodiment. Embodiment is the missing link towards human level AI. Agents embodied in a world, like AlphaGO, already surpass humans (on the Go board or Dota 2), we just need to take that ability to real world. The source of meaning is in the game, not the brain. What we need is a better simulator of the world, or a neural technique for imagination in RL, which is under works [1]. 1. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.05960.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.05960.pdf
- loosetypes 6y ago
  Thanks for the reply. > We do know how to quantify intelligence (..). But how exactly do we do that?

littlestymaar 6y ago

> In 1903 the Wright Brothers built the first airplane. In 1947, humans flew at supersonic speed for the first time. And since then, not much has changed. Commercial supersonic flight never took off, and nowadays planes still use turbofans (invented during WWII). Engineering fields commonly make many breakthrough in a really short time, and then settle down for a long period. We can't predict how far IA progress will go. In the 50s, having flying cars by 2000 didn't sound unrealistic given how much flight advanced during the first half of the century. Yet, I don't think anyone nowadays believes we'll have them by 2100. Also, between Da Vinci's Codex of the flight of birds (1502) and the Wright brothers flight, there has been four centuries. And regarding AGI, we might be closer to Da Vinci then to the Wright.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]