You're looking at Less Wrong's discussion board. This includes all posts, including those that haven't been promoted to the front page yet. For more information, see About Less Wrong.

CarlShulman comments on Update on Kim Suozzi (cancer patient in want of cryonics) - Less Wrong Discussion

45 Post author: ahartell 22 January 2013 09:15AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (61)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: CarlShulman 23 January 2013 04:06:08AM *  11 points [-]

Moore's Law had come to a nearly complete permanent halt or slowdown no more than 10-20 years after 2013

Well atom-size features are scheduled to come along on that time-scale, believed to mark the end of scaling feature size downwards. That has been an essential part of Moore's law all along the way. Without it, one has to instead do things like use more efficient materials at the same size, new architectural designs, new cooling, etc. That's a big change in the underlying mechanisms of electronics improvement, and a pretty reasonable place for the trend to go awry, although it also wouldn't be surprising if it kept going for some time longer.

AI academia was Great Stagnating (this is relatively easy to believe)

The so-called "Great Stagnation" isn't actually a stagnation, it's mainly just compounding growth at a slower rate. How much of the remaining distance to AGI do you think was covered 2002-2012? 1992-2002?

All the Foresight people were really really optimistic about nanotech

Haven't they been so far?

In any case, nanotechnology can't shrink feature sizes below atomic scale, and that's already coming up via conventional technology. Also, if the world is one where computation is energy-limited, denser computers that use more energy in a smaller space aren't obviously that helpful.

perhaps the press releases are exaggerated

Could you give some examples of what you had in mind?

Large updates in the direction of global economic slowdown, patent wars kill innovation everywhere, corruption of universities even worse than we think, even fewer smart people try to go into real tech innovation, etc.

Well, there is demographic decline: rich country populations are shrinking. China is shrinking even faster, although bringing in its youth into the innovation sectors may help a lot.

Biotech stays regulation-locked forever - not too hard to believe.

Say biotech genetic engineering methods are developed in the next 10-20 years, heavily implemented 10 years later, and the kids hit their productive prime 20 years after that. Then they go faster, but how much faster? That's a fast biotech trajectory to enhanced intelligence, but the fruit mostly fall in the last quarter of the century.

Anders Sandberg is wrong about basically everything to do with uploading.

See 15:30 of this talk, Anders' Monte Carlo simulation (assumptions debatable, obviously) is a wide curve with a center around 2075. Separately Anders expresses nontrivial uncertainty about the brain model/cognitive neuroscience step, setting aside the views of the non-Anders population.

You're the first halfway-sane person I've ever heard put the median at 2100.

vs

I didn't say 87 years, but closer to 87 than 32 (or 16, for Kurzweil's prediction of a Turing-Test passing AI).

I said "near the end of the century" contrasted to a prediction of intelligence explosion in 2045.

Comment author: Baughn 23 January 2013 09:11:23PM -1 points [-]

press releases

Here's one: http://phys.org/news/2012-08-d-wave-quantum-method-protein-problem.html

That doesn't apply to large proteins yet, but it doesn't make me optimistic about the nanotech timeline. (Which is to say, it makes me update in favor of faster R&D.)

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 24 January 2013 08:57:21PM 3 points [-]

Nobody believes in D-Wave.

Comment author: shminux 24 January 2013 09:17:51PM 1 point [-]

That seems like an oversimplification. Clearly some people do.

Scott Aaronson:

“I no longer feel like playing an adversarial role. I really, genuinely hope D-Wave succeeds.” That said, he noted that D-Wave still hadn’t provided proof of a critical test of quantum computing.

I am not qualified to judge whether the D-Wave's claim that they use quantum annealing, rather than the standard simulated annealing (as Scott suspects) in their adiabatic quantum computing is justified. However, the lack of independent replication of their claims is disconcerting.

Comment author: Kawoomba 24 January 2013 11:47:01PM 2 points [-]

However, the lack of independent replication of their claims is disconcerting.

Maybe they could get Andrea Rossi to confirm.

Comment author: CarlShulman 23 January 2013 09:38:53PM *  3 points [-]

http://blogs.nature.com/news/2012/08/d-wave-quantum-computer-solves-protein-folding-problem.html

It’s also worth pointing that conventional computers could already solve these particular protein folding problems.

You have a computer doing something we could already do, but less efficiently than existing methods, which have not been impressively useful themselves?

ETA: https://plus.google.com/103530621949492999968/posts/U11X8sec1pU

Comment author: Baughn 24 January 2013 12:20:50AM *  0 points [-]

The G+ post explains what it's good for pretty well, doesn't it?

It's not a dramatic improvement (yet), but it's a larger potential speedup than anything else I've seen on the protein-folding problem lately.

Comment author: CarlShulman 08 September 2014 04:22:04AM 0 points [-]

You can duplicate that D-Wave machine on a laptop.

Comment author: Baughn 08 September 2014 08:26:21PM 0 points [-]

True, but somewhat besides the point; it's the asymptotic speedup that's interesting.

...you know, assuming the thing actually does what they claim it does. sigh

Comment author: CarlShulman 09 September 2014 03:15:55AM 0 points [-]

Also no asymptotic speedup.