cata comments on Open Thread, August 2010 - Less Wrong

4 Post author: NancyLebovitz 01 August 2010 01:27PM

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Comment author: cata 16 August 2010 05:41:09PM *  1 point [-]

That's quite true. I mean, honestly, I would expect any AI to parallelize very well, although I'm loathe to trust my intuition about anything related to AGI. But I don't think we can take it as a given that the AI will be able to get linear or better gains in its speed of thought when going, say, from some big parallel supercomputer in a datacenter to trying to spread itself out through commodity hardware in other physical locations.

If a prospective AI had a tremendous, planet-sized amount of hardware available to it, it might hardly matter, but in the real world, I imagine that the AI would have to work hard to obtain a sizable amount of physical resources, and how well it can use those resources could make the difference between hours, days, weeks, or months of "FOOMing."

EDIT on reflection: Yeah, maybe I'm underestimating how many resources would be available.

Comment author: Morendil 16 August 2010 06:44:47PM 4 points [-]

in the real world, I imagine that the AI would have to work hard to obtain a sizable amount of physical resources

I suggest you Google the word "botnet". It isn't particularly hard for human-level intelligences to gain access to substantial computing power for selfish purposes.

Comment author: cata 16 August 2010 06:46:46PM 1 point [-]

Point taken.