4 ms·

The promise of AGI isn't really optimizing something mundane like widget manufacturing though surely it will be tasked with doing that. It's a rapid advancement

The promise of AGI isn't really optimizing something mundane like widget manufacturing though surely it will be tasked with doing that. It's a rapid advancement of the frontier of knowledge. For example we dream of curing disease and aging but it is beyond our current knowledge. Obviously nobody knows what that looks like or when or if we'll get there but there is probably a ton of existential hazards if we do. Shit even finding out things we hope for are truly impossible would be a kind of doom of its own.

ChatGTP 3y ago
Time travel would be fucking mad.
azeirah 3y ago
Yeah for sure. I do believe AI has a lot of potential to break through various hard problems we currently face in science and medicine. I just really dislike the idea of the "omniscient super-intelligent ruler of chaos" vision of AI that I keep encountering in the media.
- vacuity 3y ago
  Gotta get those ratings up. That's really all there is to it. Which sucks because AI discussions are easily derailed as a consequence.
- ChatGTP 3y ago
  I would imagine something that can think 1000x as fast as a person and has an IQ of 300 would be God like to us.
nonameiguess 3y ago
How is AGI supposed to provide this knowledge? We don't have the knowledge we need to cure disease and aging because the experiments that could potentially provide that knowledge are either too difficult to conduct or can't be conducted ethically and/or legally at all. There is also an inherently time-bound bottleneck to producing knowledge of this sort. You can't possibly demonstrate a treatment has really increased human lifespan until an entire experimental cohort lifespan passes. You can conceivable simulate an entire human body at molecular level to sidestep the issue with conducting an RCT with live subjects, but we already have sufficient knowledge of atomic physics and organic chemistry to do that right now. It's just not computationally tractable.
logicchains 3y ago
>For example we dream of curing disease and aging but it is beyond our current knowledge. The hard sciences (especially medicine) and engineering don't advance just by thinking deeply about things, they advance through physical research and experiments. A lot of these can't be sped up, e.g. clinical trials, so an AI wouldn't make much difference here. And no it can't just "simulate it all", as the computational power needed to simulate reality to that degree of accuracy is still many orders of magnitude greater than what's currently available to us.

ChatGTP 3y ago

Time travel would be fucking mad.

azeirah 3y ago

Yeah for sure. I do believe AI has a lot of potential to break through various hard problems we currently face in science and medicine. I just really dislike the idea of the "omniscient super-intelligent ruler of chaos" vision of AI that I keep encountering in the media.

vacuity 3y ago
Gotta get those ratings up. That's really all there is to it. Which sucks because AI discussions are easily derailed as a consequence.
ChatGTP 3y ago
I would imagine something that can think 1000x as fast as a person and has an IQ of 300 would be God like to us.

nonameiguess 3y ago

How is AGI supposed to provide this knowledge? We don't have the knowledge we need to cure disease and aging because the experiments that could potentially provide that knowledge are either too difficult to conduct or can't be conducted ethically and/or legally at all. There is also an inherently time-bound bottleneck to producing knowledge of this sort. You can't possibly demonstrate a treatment has really increased human lifespan until an entire experimental cohort lifespan passes. You can conceivable simulate an entire human body at molecular level to sidestep the issue with conducting an RCT with live subjects, but we already have sufficient knowledge of atomic physics and organic chemistry to do that right now. It's just not computationally tractable.

logicchains 3y ago

>For example we dream of curing disease and aging but it is beyond our current knowledge. The hard sciences (especially medicine) and engineering don't advance just by thinking deeply about things, they advance through physical research and experiments. A lot of these can't be sped up, e.g. clinical trials, so an AI wouldn't make much difference here. And no it can't just "simulate it all", as the computational power needed to simulate reality to that degree of accuracy is still many orders of magnitude greater than what's currently available to us.