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)?
Again, this is not what I mean..
Please note that I'm asking WHY you think your assertions are true.
I thought it was clear. A program, which goal is only to improve itself, as much as possible, when advanced enough, CAN influence its hardware. I don't know exactly what would be the best way to do it, but I imagine that some tinkering with the electrical currents inside the CPU might alter it on a nondestructive way as well.
The "well understood upper limit" of the PI calculating will wait for an improved hardware. Improved with the whole Earth, for example.
Search lesswrong.com and Yudkowsky about this, it is one of a few things I agree with them.