A lot can happen in 50-70 years.
We now have 7 billion people, with more of the world coming online to do R&D. China, specifically, has made it a goal to lead the world in AI by 2025.
India’s economy should grow over the next 2 decades and they will also become a world leader.
With so many resources, the world should easily advance more in the next 50 than it did in the last 100 years.
We've lived through enormous computing advances, but it's been fairly obvious for some time that hardware improvements are slowing.
I'm sure there will be amazing advancements in the next 50 years, but I expect a lot of the progress to be in fields that are either currently unknown, or seem unimportant today. Those new fields will see better return on investment.
Now we have countless companies and several countries all competing and building off each other's work in the AI space. So long as people don't get bored or the global economy doesn't collapse, progress should keep chugging along. Another key difference is that it's basically free to get into. Anyone out there can download data sets, existing algorithms, and get to work on tweaking things. There's a strong foundation for any motivated person to build off of.
I disagree with that part. Things slowed dramatically because we stopped putting extreme amounts of effort in, largely because there wasn't enough market demand for aviation or space flight beyond 1970s technology... for a while.
Overcoming physical limitations is one thing. An intelligent being creating something equally or more as intelligent as itself? And obviously I don't mean reproducing. Creating an entirely new class of thing which has intelligence equal to the creator is very different to using the forces of nature to give you an edge over gravity.
We will figure out how the brain works, make better transistors, develop better algorithms, etc
An AI “space race” between the US and China, for instance, will push the field forward over the next decade.
https://www.nasa.gov/audience/formedia/speeches/fg_kitty_haw...
70 years from the first flight to the concorde and the saturn 5. But in the 50 years since, improvements in aerospace have been incremental.
In 75 years we went from ENIAC to TFLOPS in a laptop. But looks like that breakneck pace is slowing down sharply. We've been doing AI nearly as long, and have gone from say, Eliza to GPT-3. A huge advance, but not AGI.
A lot can happen in 50 years, but we've already had our first 70ish years with AI without an AGI breakthrough.
To the definition of AGI in the link, maybe a hundred million data scientists can hone a million models, one per "economically viable" task, and start chipping away at the 95% of the economy target, but till now I'd wager AI has put many more people to work than out of it.
It just goes to show that technological advancement can happen rather unpredictably.
And since then, not much has changed. Commercial supersonic flight never took off, and nowadays planes still use turbofans (invented during WWII). Engineering fields commonly make many breakthrough in a really short time, and then settle down for a long period. We can't predict how far IA progress will go. In the 50s, having flying cars by 2000 didn't sound unrealistic given how much flight advanced during the first half of the century. Yet, I don't think anyone nowadays believes we'll have them by 2100.
Also, between Da Vinci's Codex of the flight of birds (1502) and the Wright brothers flight, there has been four centuries. And regarding AGI, we might be closer to Da Vinci then to the Wright.
Conflating them only demonstrates how far we have to go.
As for impossible talk, we have biological examples all around us of what needs to be built. We just need to imitate. Much like computer vision, algorithms sucked at it until they didn't (and all it took was someone scaling up an old design idea plus a lot of data). On the scale of gigantic ambitious goals it's pretty special in that regard. Curing cancer or death or mars colonies may indeed be impossible, by contrast.
I will agree that I trust no one's ability to predict anything. They are all just making almost-entirely-uneducated guess using a few variables out of some vast number of unknowns.
Why stick with this concept - consciousness - which is not well defined, instead of using a much more practical concept: embodiment. Embodiment is the missing link towards human level AI. Agents embodied in a world, like AlphaGO, already surpass humans (on the Go board or Dota 2), we just need to take that ability to real world. The source of meaning is in the game, not the brain. What we need is a better simulator of the world, or a neural technique for imagination in RL, which is under works [1].
> We do know how to quantify intelligence (..).
But how exactly do we do that?
OP specifically called out AGI as not requiring touch or taste, only text to beat the turing test.
> Programmers, also unlikely...Sure, you can have AIs generate more code for you, but then you'll just have the programmers working one abstraction layer up from that.
At what point do you stop calling them programmers and start calling them system architects? If I'm a programmer and my whole job can be replaced, isn't that replacing _some_ programmers? I think it's fair to argue that some programming jobs would be straight up gone. Maybe most of them.
> Sure, I could see a lot of medical professions and other "knowledge bank" type jobs being replaced. I've always thought optometrists could largely be replaced with "measure my prescription" booths controlled by a computer. But anything requiring any creative juice whatsoever will likely not be replaced.
We're not talking about what today's AI can do -- today's AI sure as hell can replace knowledge banks and some medical tasks like radiology and optometry, and yeah it can't quite make blockbuster movies. But generative AI has come a long way and there's reasons to be optimistic again. Alex cites GPT-3 and iGPT as evidence of this trajectory.
He also says "imagine 2 orders of magnitude bigger" -- models with 1.75e13 params. What emergent generative powers might we discover? Synthesizing a blockbuster movie no longer seems entirely out of reach, even if we have to move another magnitude bigger and make several more algorithmic breakthroughs.
But a text-based AGI is not replacing plumbers and electricians, which means it's only general in limited areas, like generating human-level text. It would be impressive and not doubt have plenty of uses, but it's not a threat to paper clip the world or put everyone out of a job.
Erm, only text in the turing test? That's a pretty non-general form of artificial general intelligence.
and
> Yes, it's not true AGI but AI that replaces 95% of all jobs
To be fair, being able to create an enjoyable full length hollywood-esque movie or becoming an author that can write a (creative and entertaining) book is something well under 5% of humans are capable of doing.
Perhaps you're setting the bar for AGI too high there? Does it really need to excel and exceed the capabilities of the very best of human attempts at movie making and book writing to be considered "AGI", when the vast majority of humanity can not do that?
(Also, I suspect 95% of jobs probably actively discourage "creative juice" being used. And nobody really wants to found their startup with someone who's "just an ideas guy!", if all he's ever contributing is "creative juice".)
I think there's something very insightful in your post though, and that is the observation that programmers will just work one abstraction layer up. In general, it has been demonstrated that a combination of expert + AI is far more effective than either one on their own. I can see AI becoming an indispensable tool in the tool belt of an expert, and since we want the best possible outcomes, we're not going to throw the expert out of that equation any time soon. What we may see is the need for fewer experts to get the job done, as the automation capabilities of AI allow them to become more efficient. Just like the power loom, it certainly reduced the number of humans needed, but even today, you still need some people to service the machines and to program their patterns.
That said, I would take the flip side of this bet to be settled at the end of the 50 years, for at least 90% chance of AIs able to create hollywood-esque movies within the next 50 years, though possibly not for AI plumbers in that time frame. For that matter, I would put at least 10% on a movie with an AI-generated script having global box office numbers topping $1B by the end of this decade.
I'd like to take that bet. I'd even speed up the timeline a bit, especially when it comes to the book.
Let's say, if there's no completely AI generated (so no human editing) book on the new york times best seller list #1 for at least a duration of 2 weeks, before 2040, I'll be very surprised.
I understand the hypothetical dangers of an AGI with the "wrong" reward function where "wrong" includes "like humans in terms of species-tribalism and intelligence-smugness", but I don't actually see a media generator AI necessarily having human-esque identity that you're suggesting.
For the entertainment of the creator. Maybe you are right that AGI will be entertained by watching humans turn into vegetables as they aimlessly watch a screen for hours at a time, but I suspect not.
Maybe let's hope that a hypothetical AGI finds us "cute".
AGI might have reason to keep us alive, sure, but why create media for us? Given our current trajectory, AGI will be very energy hungry. How will it justify using that energy for the sake of human entertainment?
I doubt that "I'll even settle for a book that can rival human authors." states a sharp edged criterion that separates before from after. Crossing the gap between rivaling Barbara Cartland and rivaling Tolstoy mind take a century of software development.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autorefractor
However optometrists do a lot more than just write prescriptions for corrective lenses.
It would be nice if this was at least an option for people who might not have vision insurance or for whatever reason don't want to proceed through the traditional system
You cannot make a bet on a statement of probability. It's unfalsifiable (unless, within the next 50 years, someone finds a way to take a random sample of the multiverse).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hQysqfSEzciRazx8k/forecastin...
Sure, I could see a lot of medical professions and other "knowledge bank" type jobs being replaced. I've always thought optometrists could largely be replaced with "measure my prescription" booths controlled by a computer. But anything requiring any creative juice whatsoever will likely not be replaced.
*Yes, it's not true AGI but AI that replaces 95% of all jobs