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Given the ever-growing computing power, computation itself becoming cheaper and the extremely wide reach of information on the internet, the outcome is inevitab

Given the ever-growing computing power, computation itself becoming cheaper and the extremely wide reach of information on the internet, the outcome is inevitable either way. Even if you time-traveled 10 years back and somehow erased all modern ML research from existence, there'd still be a point in time where, eventually, some guy in a garage would do the work. Eventually, the work we use massive server clusters for today would be run on consumer-grade computers, and someone would try their hand at it. It has always been the case that new technology doesn't ask for permission to exist. Even if we lived in this society that was extremely risk-averse and suspicious of any new developments, at some point the bar would get so low that, if companies refused to invest and do the research, individuals would.

_heimdall 3y ago
Are you effectively using something akin to a multiverse scenario to guarantee that one outcome is inevitable? By multiverse here I'm mainly pointing to the idea of branching of all possible outcomes, not strictly trying to say that the idea I'd about jumping to an actual different universe. If you could go back 10 years and erase all ML research, for example, there would be fundamental differences. The number of people that understand how those systems would be much smaller. Hardware would be different, for example we wouldn't have tensor chips and GPUs would still be primarily for playing Call of Duty. Cell phones, search, even more benign systems like traffic control on city streets would look different. There's simply way too much changed even with that one jump to possibly guarantee that we'd find ourselves in the same boat inventing AI or AGI on roughly the same timeline.