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> The thing I'm pointing to is that there are certain (relatively) specialized tasks like 'par-human biotech innovation' that require more or less the same kind of thinking that you'd need for arbitrary tasks in the physical world. The same way Go requires AGI, and giving semantic descriptions of photos requires AGI, and producing accurate translations requires AGI? Be extremely cautious when you make claims like these. There are certainly tasks that seem to require being humanly smart in humanly ways, but the only things I feel I could convincingly argue being in that category involve modelling humans and having human judges. Biotech is a particularly strong counterexample, because not only is there no reason to believe our brand of socialized intelligence is particularly effective at it, but the only other thing that seems to have tried seems to have a much weaker claim at to intelligence yet far outperforms us: natural selection. It's easy to look at our lineage, from ape-like creatures to early humans to modern civilization, and draw a curve on which you can place intelligence, and then call this "general" and the semi-intelligent tools we've made so far "specialized", but in many ways this is just an illusion. It's easier to see this if you ignore humans, and compare today's best AI against, say, chimps. In some regards a chimp seems like a general intelligence, albeit a weak one. It has high and low cognition, it has memory, it is goal-directed but flexible. Our AIs don't come close. But a chimp can't translate text or play Go. It can't write code, however narrow a domain. Our AIs can. When I say I expect the first genuinely dangerous AI to be specialized, I don't mean that it will be specific to one task; even neural networks seem to generalize surprisingly well in that way. I mean it won't have the assortment of abilities that we consider fundamental to what we think of as intelligence. It might have no real overarching structure that allows it to plan or learn. It might have no metacognition, and I'd bet against it having the ability to convincingly model people. But maybe if you point it at a network and tell it to break things before heading to bed, you'd wake up to a world on fire. |