I don't think I'm particularly in denial about the prospects of AI. I think it's going to be hugely disruptive and could possibly put me out of a job.
But I'd like to posit a hypothetical counterpoint, just to get you thinking. So far, all of the work on AGI has been the result of brute forcing. We've tried to develop a structural understanding of how the human brain works, and we've failed. So we've fallen back to torturing circuits into reorienting themselves into compression algorithms for human knowledge. The mechanisms that these tortured circuits used for doing so, the structures they produced in N-dimensional space to embody that knowledge -- we have very little understanding of how these things actually work under the hood.
I think a lot of the grandoise hypotheses about the future of AGI emerging from this avenue of invention are overly optimistic. Why are we so confident that this brute force approach will continue to bear fruit for us? At what point will it overcome the long tail of inadequacy that it's currently exhibiting?
The 20th century bears several notable examples of would-be-transformative technologies that have since stalled, and failed to live up to their promise. Nuclear power. Space travel. Industries buckling under the weight of their own complexity, suffering from the human inability to keep the emergent externalities in check. Why would AI be any different?
I predict a future where increasing global hardship, conflict and scarcity renders the current type of energy-intensive AI approaches infeasible.
But I'd like to posit a hypothetical counterpoint, just to get you thinking. So far, all of the work on AGI has been the result of brute forcing. We've tried to develop a structural understanding of how the human brain works, and we've failed. So we've fallen back to torturing circuits into reorienting themselves into compression algorithms for human knowledge. The mechanisms that these tortured circuits used for doing so, the structures they produced in N-dimensional space to embody that knowledge -- we have very little understanding of how these things actually work under the hood.
I think a lot of the grandoise hypotheses about the future of AGI emerging from this avenue of invention are overly optimistic. Why are we so confident that this brute force approach will continue to bear fruit for us? At what point will it overcome the long tail of inadequacy that it's currently exhibiting?
The 20th century bears several notable examples of would-be-transformative technologies that have since stalled, and failed to live up to their promise. Nuclear power. Space travel. Industries buckling under the weight of their own complexity, suffering from the human inability to keep the emergent externalities in check. Why would AI be any different?
I predict a future where increasing global hardship, conflict and scarcity renders the current type of energy-intensive AI approaches infeasible.