[jillav]

> But there's also the risk of a runaway reaction, where a machine intelligence reaches and exceeds human levels of intelligence in a very short span of time.

This always puzzles me. I don't have enough knowledge about AI to be objective about that kind of statement. But deep down, I feel skeptic about it.

Not long ago I saw an episode of a show occuring in the late 80's. This kid had just received a computer as a gift and was talking to a kind-of-AI program through keyboard and screen.

The AI reactions to the kid's input was not dumber or smarter than Siri or any other currently widespread kind-of-ai program. I don't know if the show was accurate vis-a-vis this particuliar software but I like to think it was. If it was, that means in the last 30 years AI hasn't really gone further. Computer power has. Algorithms not so much.

I'd love to get the opinion of someone that has a good understanding of the current state of the AI art.

[michaelmrose]

Before concluding that multitudes of researchers spent 3 decades and learned nothing of note it might be worthwhile to at least spent 5 minutes doing a search.

Imagine if you knew nothing about car safety features but never having been in an accident it didn't seem like cars are any safer or more dangerous than in the 60s.

[vidarh]

How far along we are now isn't really the question.

The question is if we are able to get an AI to the level of intelligence where it can look at its own code and spot an opportunity to improve it, and the ability to do so, and whether or not the computational capacity immediately available to it is sufficient to reach a level where it is smart enough to find ways to obtain more resources.

The threshold for improvement can be very low if it has enough time and resources to compensate.

E.g in the most extreme case it just needs the ability to randomly flip bits and test the result, but that would require extreme resources for the initial improvements.

[kiriakasis]

Specifically the author agrees with you