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Bugmaster comments on Risks from AI and Charitable Giving - Less Wrong
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I can't speak for XiXiDu, but I myself have noticed a bit of magical thinking that is sometimes employed by proponents of AGI/FAI. It goes something like this (exaggerated for effect):
1). It's possible to create an AI that would recursively make itself smarter
2). Therefore the AI would make itself very nearly infinitely smart
3). The AI would then use its intelligence to acquire godlike powers
As I see it, though, #2 does not necessarily follow from #1, unless one makes an implicit assumption that Moore's Law (or something like it) is a universal and unstoppable law of nature (like the speed of light or something). And #3 does not follow from #2, for reasons that XiXiDu articulated -- even if we assume that godlike powers can exist at all, which I personally doubt.
If you took the ten smartest scientists alive in the world today, and transported them to Ancient Rome, they wouldn't be able to build an iPhone from scratch no matter how smart they were. In addition, assuming that what we know of science today is more or less correct, we could predict with a high degree of certainty that no future scientist, no matter how superhumanly smart, would be able to build a perpetual motion device.
Edited to add: I was in the process of outlining a discussion post on this very subject, but then XiXiDu scooped me. Bah, I say !
I'd still like to see you write it, if it's concise.
#2 does not need to follow since we already know it's false - infinite intelligence is not on offer by the basic laws of physics aside from Tipler's dubious theories. If it is replaced by 'will make itself much smarter than us', that is enough. (Have you read Chalmer's paper?)
Which reasons would those be? And as I've pointed out, the only way to cure your doubt if the prior history of humanity is not enough would be to actually demonstrate the powers, with the obvious issue that is.
Ok, but how much smarter ? Stephen Hawking is much smarter than me, for example, but I'm not worried about his existence, and in fact see it as a very good thing, though I'm not expecting him to invent "gray goo" anytime soon (or, in fact, ever).
I realize that quantifying intelligence is a tricky proposition, so let me put it this way: can you list some feats of intelligence, currently inaccessible to us, which you would expect a dangerously smart AI to be able to achieve ? And, segueing into #3, how do these feats of intelligence translate into operational capabilities ?
Probably not; which paper are you referring to ?
The ones I alluded to in my next paragraph:
The problem here is that raw intelligence is not enough to achieve a tangible effect on the world. If your goal is to develop and deploy a specific technology, such as an iPhone, you need the infrastructure that would supply your raw materials and labor. This means that your technology can't be too far ahead of what everyone else in the world is already using.
Even if you were ten times smarter than any human, you still wouldn't be able to conjure a modern CPU (such as the one used in iPhones) out of thin air. You'd need (among other things) a factory, and a power supply to run it, and mines to extract the raw ores, and refineries to produce plastics, and the people to run them full-time, and the infrastructure to feed those people, and a government (or some other hegemony) to organize them, and so on and so forth... None of which existed in Ancient Rome (with the possible exception of the hegemony, and even that's a stretch). Sure, you could build all of that stuff from scratch, but then you wouldn't be going "FOOM", you'd be going "are we there yet" for a century or so (optimistically speaking).
Are you referring to some specific historical events ? If so, which ones ?