To broaden things a bit discussionwise.
The leap from 1950's transistors and semi conductors to what...early 90's?
I'm not familiar enough with material science or any of that to make an intelligent call but does it seem like a logical progression or on inspection does it actually raise questions about recovered UFO technology?
At the very least I feel like experts in those fields either have or could point out that something seems fishy or they could convincgly dismiss the assertion.
continue to fail at basic reasoning.
But , a huge huge portion of human labor doesnt require basic reasoning. Its rote enough to use flowcharts , I don't need my calculator to "understand" math , I need it to give me the correct answer.
And for the "hallucinating" behavior you can just have it learn not do to that by rote. Even if you still need 10% of a certain "discipline" (job) to double check that the AI isn't making things up you've still increased productivity insanely.
And what does that profit and freed up capital do other than chase more profit and invest in things that draw down all the conditionals vastly?
5% increased productivity here , 3% over here , it all starts to multiply.
I guess I just feel completely different about those conditional probabilities.
Unless we hit another AI winter the profit and national security incentives just snowball right past almost all of those. Regulation? "Severe depression"
I admit that thr loss of taiwan does innfact set back chip manufactyre by a decade or more regardless of resoyrces thrown at it but every other case just seems way off (because of the incentive structure)
So we're what , 3 months post chatgpt and customer service and drive throughs are solved or about to be solved? , so lets call that the lowrst hanging fruit. So just some quick back of the napkin google fu , the customer service by itself is a 30 billion dollar industry just in the US.
And how much more does the math break down if say , we have an AGI that can do construction work (embodied in a robot) at say 90% human efficiency for...27 dollars an hour?
In my mind every human task fully (or fully enough) automated snowballs the economic incentive and pushes more resources and man hours into solving problems with material science and things like...idk piston designs or multifunctionality or whatever.
I admit I'm impressed by the collected wisdom and apparent track records of these authors but it seems like its missing the key drivers for further improvement in the analysis.
Like would the authors have put the concept of a smartphone at 1% by 2020 if asked in 2001 based on some abnormally high conditionals about seemingly rational but actually totally orthagonal concern based on how well palm pilots did?
I also dont see how the semi conductor fab bottleneck is such a thing? , 21 million users of openai costs 700k a day to run.
So taking some liberties here but thats 30 bucks a person (so a loss with their current model but thats not my point)
If some forthcoming iteration with better cognitive architecture etc costs about that then we have , 1.25$ per hour to replace a human "thinking" job.
Im having trouble seeing how we don't rapidly advance robotics and chip manufacture and mining and energy production etc when we stumble into a world where thats the only bottleneck standing in our way to 100% replacemwnt of all useful human labor.
Again , you got the checkout clerks at grocery stores last decade. 3 months in and the entire customer service industry is on its knees. Even if you only get 95% as good as a human and have to sort of take things one at a time to start with , all that excess productivity and profit then chases the next thing. It snowballs from here.
Well to flesh that out , we could have an ASI that seems valye aligned and controllable...until it isn't.
Or the sociap effects (deep fakes for example) cpuld ruin the world or land us in a dystopia well before actual AGI.
But that might be a bit orthagonal and in the weeds (specific examples of how we end up with x-risk or s-risk end scenarios without the attributing magic powers to the ASI)
I think degree to which LPE is actually necessary for solving problems in any given domain, as well as the minimum amount of time, resources, and general tractability of obtaining such LPE, is an empirical question which people frequently investigate for particular important domains.
Isn't it sort of "god in the gaps" to presume that the ASI , simply by having lots of compute , no longer actually has to validate anything and apply the scientific method in the reality its attempting to exert control over?
We have machine learning algo's in biomedicine screen for molecules of interest. This lowers the fail rate of new pharmaceuticals , most of them still fail. Most of them during rat and mouse studies.
So all available human data on chemistry , pharmacodynamics , pharmacokinetics etc + the best simulation models available (alphago etc) still wont result in it being able to "hit" on a new drug for say "making humans obedient zombies" on the first try.
Even if we hand wave and say it discovers a bunch of insights in our data we dont have access to , their are simply too many variables and sheer unknowns for this to work without it being able to simulate human bodies down to the molecular level.
So it can discover a nerve gas thats deadly enough no problem , but we already have deadly nerve gas.
It just again , seems very hand wavy to have all these leaps in reasoning "because ASI" when good hypothesis prove false all the time upon application of avtual experimentation.
But every environment which isn't perfectly known and every "goal" which isn't complete concrete , opens up error. Which then stacka upon error as any "plan" to interact with / modify reality adds another step.
If the ASI can infer some materials science breakthroughs with given human knowledge and existing experimental data to some great degree of certainty , ok I buy it.
What I don't buy is that it can simulate enough actions and reactions with enough certainty to nail a large domain of things on the first try.
But I suppose thats still sort of moot from an existential risk perspective because FOOM and sharp turns aren't really a requirement.
But "inferring" the best move in tic tac toe and say "developing a unified theory of reality without access to super colliders" is a stretch that doesn't hold up to reason.
"Hands on experience ia not magic" , neither is "superintelligence" , the LLM's already hallucinate and any concievable future iteration will still be bound by physics , a few wrong assumptions compounded together can whiff a lot of hyperintelligent schemes.
For point one , yes. We have evidence that your body has a steady state homeostatic "weight" that it will attempt to return you to. Which is why on the whole all fad diets are equivalent and none are reccomended.
"Non metabolic" is sort of a vague statement but top of my head besides "organs" i'd imagine the possible gut flora problems could be huge (or it might be great because presumably you have flora right now encouraging excess fat etc)
I'm not sure the terms as you define them really hold.
https://ourworldindata.org/trust
So , the nations with high trust levels dont seem to map to your take. Chinas rated very highly , but from a western perspecrive its rather coercive socially right?
And what about small cohesive agricultural towns? , my...knee jerk take is that you should re-evaluate this model with a "maslows hierarchy" foundation.
Right right. It doesn't need to be finctionalized , just a kind of fun documentary. The key is , this stuff is not interesting for most folks. Mesa optimization sounds like a snore.
You have to be able to walk the audience through it in ane engaging way.
I had similar hpusing related "i'm the smartest guy in the room" belief some years back.
I was looking at broad amounts people were retiring on (not enough) in the US and then extrapolated that these older folks would have to sell or get second mortgages just to live.
And since the baby boomers are retiring , I thought (with no more data or numbers to back me) that we would see signifigant downward pressure on housing prices.
But of course as long as this doesn't happen in large piles , in large numbers of zipcodes and sort of in a short amount of time , then its not an issue.
Over decades in large parts of the world facing demographic challenges yeh. Not here.