Ah, OK.
Agreed that IF it turns out that existing hardware is incapable of supporting software capable of designing a wholly automated chip factory, THEN humans are a necessary part of the self-improvement cycle for as many iterations as it takes to come up with hardware that is capable of that (plus one final iteration).
I'm not as confident of that premise as you sound, but it's certainly possible.
Existing hardware might be capable of supporting software capable of designing an automated chip factory. But the assumption required for the FOOM scenario is much stronger than that.
To get an automated self-improving system, it's not enough to design -- you have to actually build. And the necessary factory has to build a lot more than chips. I'm certain that existing hardware attached to general purpose computers is insufficient to build much of anything. And the sort of robotic actuators required to build a wholly automated factory are pretty far from wh...
I am emailing experts in order to raise and estimate the academic awareness and perception of risks from AI. Below are some questions I am going to ask. Please help to refine the questions or suggest new and better questions.
(Thanks goes to paulfchristiano, Steve Rayhawk and Mafred.)
Q1: Assuming beneficially political and economic development and that no global catastrophe halts progress, by what year would you assign a 10%/50%/90% chance of the development of artificial intelligence that is roughly as good as humans at science, mathematics, engineering and programming?
Q2: Once we build AI that is roughly as good as humans at science, mathematics, engineering and programming, how much more difficult will it be for humans and/or AIs to build an AI which is substantially better at those activities than humans?
Q3: Do you ever expect artificial intelligence to overwhelmingly outperform humans at typical academic research, in the way that they may soon overwhelmingly outperform humans at trivia contests, or do you expect that humans will always play an important role in scientific progress?
Q4: What probability do you assign to the possibility of an AI with initially (professional) human-level competence at general reasoning (including science, mathematics, engineering and programming) to self-modify its way up to vastly superhuman capabilities within a matter of hours/days/< 5 years?
Q5: How important is it to figure out how to make superhuman AI provably friendly to us and our values (non-dangerous), before attempting to build AI that is good enough at general reasoning (including science, mathematics, engineering and programming) to undergo radical self-modification?
Q6: What probability do you assign to the possibility of human extinction as a result of AI capable of self-modification (that is not provably non-dangerous, if that is even possible)?