[naasking]

> But if we're on a more-than-linear increase, then we should be seeing more and more technological growth in very recent timeframes, not needing to reach back centuries or millennia.

We are. Look at the time frame from the invention of the transistor to everyone doing nearly everything online. It's less than the average human lifetime.

Look at the timeline from the first computer program to play chess, to beating chess world champions, to the recent announcement of DeepMind that beat all existing computer programs after teaching itself the game within the span of a few hours.

Look at the timeframe of computer programs that take dictation to programs that automatically translate between nearly all commonly used languages on Earth.

The same could be said for computer vision, computer music, computers driving, and so on.

I think the people skeptical of the intelligence explosion are missing the forest for the trees. Our progress in the last century alone is mind boggling. Certainly we can debate the values of the parameters in the intelligence explosion we're in the midst of, but denying it entirely is silly.

[aetherson]

Or it just seems like that to you because these are the changes that you've viscerally experienced instead of just reading about.

Someone born in 1900, looking back at their life in 1975, would be like "When I was born, heavier-than-air flight was impossible. Now people routinely fly across oceans at 600 mph, you can travel faster than the speed of sound for admittedly a lot of money, and we've gone to the motherfuckin' moon. Vast swathes of work has been automated, to the point where we essentially ended an entire industry (personal servants). Automobiles went from being curiosities to something that even poor people have and use every day. We split the atom, we brought women into the workforce, we invented electronic computers, we invented radar, we turned radio from a science project to TVs that every family have. We invented antibiotics and childhood mortality fell by some enormous percentage."

"You're very impressed that computers went from 'pretty good at playing chess' to 'extremely good at playing chess' in just 20 years. Maybe you're the one who's missing the forest for the trees."

[naasking]

Like the other poster, these are also examples of super-linear progress, so I'm not sure what you think this proves.

For my point, the super-linear progress in information tech is all that's needed to argue in favour of the intelligence explosion.

[aetherson]

You seem to think that a short period of fast technology growth in some areas corresponds to the claim that technology as a whole is improving more-than-linearly.

Compare the y values of the functions y = x vs. y = sqrt(x) over the x values in the interval [0..1]. Or the slopes of the lines.

It's been 42 years since 1975. If technological advance was faster from 1900-1975 than it has been from 1976-2017, or "only as fast," then that's important to understand, and probably more relevant to our immediate future than whether technological growth from 8000 BC to 1900 AD was either by some standard very impressive or slower than growth from 1900-2000.

[naasking]

Firstly, growth rates of non-information tech largely isn't relevant to AI. That said, overall growth in knowledge is at least directly proportional to population growth. Even pessimistically considering humans as dumb, an exponential population growth means an exponential discovery rate just from sheer trial and error. So overall progress is undeniably exponential, even if it's a low exponent.

Secondly, we know definitively that information density has been growing exponentially given Moore's law. The much decried end of Moore's law is for a particular incarnation of information tech, but there's still plenty of room to grow in other directions.

Even with our current tech base, we can continue to scale exponentially in horizontal directions with more parallelism (see the rise of core counts, GPU and distributed computing). We're nowhere near the end of that scaling in that direction, let alone longer term innovations like optical and quantum computing.

So really, what possible reasons do we really have for thinking that exponential growth will not continue well past human intelligence? Note, I didn't say infinitely, just well past our intelligence.

[aetherson]

Overall growth in knowledge isn't at least directly proportional to population growth, if the proportion of knowledge already known and shared grows with population growth.

But even if it did, we don't have another doubling of human population ahead of us, so you better hope we're already there.

As you point out, Moore's Law doesn't have a ton more power available to it either.

Lots of problems don't parallelize well, quantum computing has never demonstrated more power than classical computing, and who knows where optical computing will go, but more to the point, hardware growth doesn't in fact guarantee an intelligence explosion.

What possible reasons do we have for thinking that exponential growth has ever happened in terms of actual progress, rather than things like "transistor density"?

Look, every futurist in the world in 1975 thought that by 2017, we'd all be routinely traveling faster than sound, that we'd have colonies on the moon if not mars, and that probably we'd have AGI or something pretty close to it by 2017. The reasons we don't have supersonic travel and common space travel aren't simplistic things like "it's physically impossible to pack energy this densely" or "you can't go this fast."

[naasking]

> Overall growth in knowledge isn't at least directly proportional to population growth, if the proportion of knowledge already known and shared grows with population growth.

I don't see why.

> But even if it did, we don't have another doubling of human population ahead of us, so you better hope we're already there

Right, but we have plenty of doublings of intelligent non-human agents ahead of us. Until then, we increase our effective intelligence using semi-intelligent machines, like we've been augmenting our physical strength with mechanical devices for millennia.

> As you point out, Moore's Law doesn't have a ton more power available to it either.

I disagree. Frequency scaling won't yield too much more improvement. There are other scaling modes available though, as I described. Moore's law is about information density, not performance.

> Lots of problems don't parallelize well

Often repeated, but frequently overstated. Our knowledge of parallelism is still in its infancy.

> quantum computing has never demonstrated more power than classical computing,

Any other option would require rewriting a lot of physics.

> hardware growth doesn't in fact guarantee an intelligence explosion.

Increased information density beyond that available in the human brain means simulating said brain is feasible. That's as close to a guarantee as you can get.

> Look, every futurist in the world in 1975 thought that by 2017, we'd all be routinely traveling faster than sound, that we'd have colonies on the moon if not mars, and that probably we'd have AGI or something pretty close to it by 2017

Except I'm not giving a timeline, I'm saying it's inevitable. Low exponent exponential growth is still exponential. The intelligence explosion is about a trend, not a fixed milestone.

[evgen]

> Look at the time frame from the invention of the transistor to everyone doing nearly everything online. It's less than the average human lifetime.

Look at the time frame from from the invention of controlled heavier-than-air flight to landing a man on the moon; within a human lifetime and before you were born.

Look at the time frame from the point when the vast majority of the human population lived their entire life within a 50 mile radius of where they were born and when fast transportation and global travel exponentially increased the genetic mixing of humanity; within a human lifetime and before our grandparents were born.

Look at the time frame from the point when information could travel no faster than the speed of a good horse to the time when information could travel across the ocean in the time it took you to saddle a horse; within a human lifetime and almost two centuries ago.

Our progress in the last century is significant, but you over-estimate its importance because you are surrounded by it and have little understanding of the history of technology. Things that may seem trivial or even primitive to you were far more important and world-changing inventions, while a lot of what we currently consider significant advances are only important because, for example, we lived in a time when people played finite games better than machines and were around to see that era end.

[naasking]

Those are all examples of super-linear progress, so I'm not sure what point you think you've made.

> Things that may seem trivial or even primitive to you were far more important and world-changing inventions

Which has zero bearing on the point I was making, which is that super-linear progress in information technology is all around us. Information tech is all that matters to the question of general AI. Like I said, you're missing the forest for the trees.

[goatlover]

That's only true if the information technology is leading up to AGI, and not say, augmenting human intelligence instead. One could argue that the intelligence explosion has been happening for centuries, but it's human intelligence not machine, that is being amplified.

[naasking]

> One could argue that the intelligence explosion has been happening for centuries, but it's human intelligence not machine, that is being amplified.

I agree, humans have been amplifying their own abilities with tech. It's been our biggest competitive advantage. However, at some point information tech will become sophisticated enough to match the capabilities of human brains. At that point, humans will be left behind.

The best outcome in this scenario is humans merging with their machines, and that would be a continuation of that same trend. But, it's not the only plausible outcome, and that's what's troubling.

[renox]

> Look at the time frame from the point when information could travel no faster than the speed of a good horse

Incorrect example: semaphore relays existed already, but yes transoceanic communications happened very fast indeed.