| About the religious thing, I think the catholic mindset is that the end of the world can't be predicted and anticipated. That you should worry less about it than the afterlife. Most protestant actually think the same way but protestantism is more diverse. If 9 out of 10 groups do not care about the apocalypse, you will not hear from them. You will hear from the JW-style preacher saying the end of the world comes next week. Also, the notion of the rapture is pretty much a protestant interpretation. Most catholics see nothing to rejoice about in the apocalypse, even for good believers. Back on the AI. Take this scenario: we make a software that's can be as smart as a human engineer, runs in 100% realtime speed on the fastest CPU we can produce. We know it is physically possible because our brain does that. Buy all the CPU you can buy, compared to human researchers it is cheap. Make teams of hundreds of units (or whatever number is ideal). Put some team on the task of improving the parallelization of the AI program, some on the task of designing a faster CPU, some on the single-core optimization of the code, some on the theoretical research to improve the underlying algorithms. You'll quickly gain exponential results. Actually you will get a fast exponential rise of global intelligence. The number of researchers will not show an exponential function but a steep step: almost overnight the number of minds working in R&D will change its order of magnitude. This is disruptive. All the currently researched and underfunded problems will be solved orders of magnitude faster. The small problems not worth solving nowadays will see teams of hundreds of top engineers devoted to them. > The strategy of working harder, on the other hand, would imply that someone would be willing to supply exponentially rising amounts of energy. Again, even if some Zuckerberg or some shady government agency would be willing to play this game, you'd quickly run into hard limits. Science fiction authors searched for that hard limit but do not see a roadblock until all of earth's matter has been converted to computronium and in a matrioshka brain, making us reach type II on the Kardashev scale. And I agree with them. Yes, more energy will be required. So what? With enough research to improve generation and automation of construction and deployment of power plants, we can have an exponential rise in energy for quite a while. And if we mastered fusion, we could even go beyond type II civilizations. > So yeah, AI is not the first game changing phenomenon in the history of humankind but it will change stuff. Like did bronze, railroads, or nukes. I don't think humanity ever had an event of the same potential. Maybe the birth of civilization, when they started gathering in cities, but even these changes were pretty slow, and their effects happened at the time scale of human reproduction, that has not changed since millions of years. The changes we are talking about rely on our speed of CPU power production, which we improve constantly and that this process will accelerate. |