Crux comments on Will AGI surprise the world? - Less Wrong
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"What I discovered" was that all the pieces for a seed AGI exist, are demonstrated to work as advertised, and could be assembled together rather quickly if adequate resources were available to do so. Really all that is required is rolling up our sleeves and doing some major integrative work in putting the pieces together.
With designs that are public knowledge (albeit not contained in one place), this could be done as well-funded project in the order of 5 years -- an assessment that concurs with what is said by the leaders of the project I am thinking of as well.
My own unpublished contribution is a refinement of this particular plan which strips out those pieces not strictly needed for a seed UFAI (these components being learnt by the AI rather than hand coded), and tweaks the remaining structure slightly in order to favor self-modifying agents. The critical path here is 2 years assuming infinite resources, but more scarily the actual resources needed are quire small. With the right people it could be done in a basement in maybe 3-4 years and take the world by storm.
But here's the conundrum, as was mentioned in one of the other sub-threads: how do I convince you of that, without walking you through the steps involved in creating an UFAI? If I am right, I would then have posted on the internet blueprints for the destruction of humankind. Then the race would really be on.
So what can I do, except encourage people to walk the same path I did, and see if they come to the same conclusions?
[retracted]
Read the OP, I didn't make any boisterous claims. I simply said UFAI is 2-5 years away, focused effort, and 10-20 years away otherwise. I therefore believe it important that FAI research be refocused on near-term solutions. I state so publicly in order to counter the entrenched meme that seems to have infected everyone here, saying that AI is X years away, where X is some arbitrary number that by golly seems like a lot, in the hope that some people who encounter the post consider refocusing on near-term work. What's wrong with that?
Disregard my reply. I really shouldn't be posting from my phone at 2 AM. Such a venture rarely ends well.
Yeah, I've been there before. No worries ;)