(November 4, 2016 at 6:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: and the means by which ai would improve itself faster than humans has been discussed not only in the video but many times in the thread - on the basis of speed alone.
And is a wholly unfounded assumption.
We have no reason to believe that an AI would improve itself faster than humans. How could it? No one has explained this yet or given any reason to assume that it would. Why would an AI be able to do this and not a natural agent?
People see computers are fast at certain tasks and assume that they are always faster than brains. This is totally wrong. Brains are actually faster than computers at a lot of things. For example, if I throw an apple at you, or it's partially hidden, or it's lifted up, sideways, rotated, coloured differently, you still instantly recognise it as an apple. You also have certain connotations and memories of apples that come immediately to mind. The processing power for this is absolutely immense but we don't even think about it. It just happens.
(November 4, 2016 at 6:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: It could do intellectual work many, many times faster than even a commensurately intelligent human being is -capable- of doing. This intellectual work might just be ai research...how could that have escaped you as an ai researcher...don;t you already use machine intelligence for precisely this purpose? I can't imagine that you're sitting there with paper and pencil running simulations by hand.
It's precisely because I use machine intelligence for my tools that I know how slow it is. I can spend weeks or months evolving a simple agent controller that will do something very simple but intelligent. I won't know how it works unless I spend weeks or months of my life analysing it.
(November 4, 2016 at 6:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: The machine that designs machines.
Which again makes assumptions. How does a machine do this? It can't know in advance what will and will not work. Each solution has to be evaluated. This takes an extremely long time. You are essentially assuming that the whole course of evolution will happen in an instant.
(November 4, 2016 at 6:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Energy is bordering on a complete dodge. Lack of energy hasn't stopped us yet, nor has it stopped our own intelligence machines, our brains. Dealing with surplus energy in the form of heat is a more technical and practical concern. We've got the juice, and could get a hell of alot more of it..if that was the problem.
No. Energy requirements are critical. The lower the energy consumption, the more processing you can do. You can't have an android or drone walking or flying around that requires several megawatts to run. Nor can you offload the processing to a remote server either because it has to react in real time.
The less energy that is required, the more sustainable it is.
(November 4, 2016 at 6:12 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Particularly if we were plugging in a machine that could do 20k years of human intellect level research in a week.......not even based on it being super smart, just super fast - like our machines already are. Harris describes this as the "winner take all" scenario that ai would effect upon us. To be second is to be obsolete. To be first is to win the world.
How would the AI understand the implications of what it is researching if it is not embodied in the real world? How would an energy inefficient AI make use of that information if all it is is a computer with no actuators?
