That’s true, on a non human timescale the progress is nearly impossible to predict, especially with novel technology. For example, when space travel was an early concept, we thought travelling the stars was a forgone conclusion. We now know that any exploration in that front will be locked behind either breakthrough science or will be limited to slow generation ships, or robotic exploration.
That a technology capable of producing human level intelligence, or beyond does feel like a certainty since there is no reason to believe that the process of intelligent thought is limited to a biological substrate. We haven’t discovered any fundamental physical laws that stop us from doing this yet. Key issues to solve beyond the hardware problem come into effect with alignment, understanding the key fundamentals of consciousness and intelligence, understanding different types of minds beyond those of humans, and better understandings of emergent phenomena. But these areas will be explored in sufficient detail to yield an answer within time.
I will have to read these other books, I’m definitely interested in picking up some more good books.
I think the alignment question is definitely interesting, since an AI could have very different interests and goals from our own. There was actually a fun article from Ted Chiang on the subject. He points out how corporations can be viewed as a kind of a higher level entity that is an emergent phenomenon that’s greater than the sum of its part. In that sense we can view it as an artificial agent with its own goals which don’t necessarily align with the goals of humanity.
That’s true, on a non human timescale the progress is nearly impossible to predict, especially with novel technology. For example, when space travel was an early concept, we thought travelling the stars was a forgone conclusion. We now know that any exploration in that front will be locked behind either breakthrough science or will be limited to slow generation ships, or robotic exploration.
That a technology capable of producing human level intelligence, or beyond does feel like a certainty since there is no reason to believe that the process of intelligent thought is limited to a biological substrate. We haven’t discovered any fundamental physical laws that stop us from doing this yet. Key issues to solve beyond the hardware problem come into effect with alignment, understanding the key fundamentals of consciousness and intelligence, understanding different types of minds beyond those of humans, and better understandings of emergent phenomena. But these areas will be explored in sufficient detail to yield an answer within time.
I will have to read these other books, I’m definitely interested in picking up some more good books.
I think the alignment question is definitely interesting, since an AI could have very different interests and goals from our own. There was actually a fun article from Ted Chiang on the subject. He points out how corporations can be viewed as a kind of a higher level entity that is an emergent phenomenon that’s greater than the sum of its part. In that sense we can view it as an artificial agent with its own goals which don’t necessarily align with the goals of humanity.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/tedchiang/the-real-danger-to-civilization-isnt-ai-its-runaway