[pron]

> I suspect we just have different beliefs about how close we are to RSI.

I don't have any belief on the matter, but my scepticism isn't necessarily about RSI itself, but about how much it would matter even if it does happen soon. Too many things are limited by lack of resources that no brain in a jar can obtain. And if such a brain in a jar itself is very expensive to operate, it may not be easy for it to justify its existence. My point is that the technical aspect is uncertain, but it is also only a part of a larger system that's has many sources of uncertainty.

[jmoggr]

This makes sense. Interacting with the world is hard and poses real bottlenecks.

I think that resource acquisition is a solvable problem for such a system, robots seem mainly limited by software.

I concede that I am too certain about the linearity of it. But like, cmon man, in the limit entropy ensures that everything ends. The world could still get very weird very fast. I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.

That's all I'm trying to argue at least. And I admit that waving my hand at linearity sounds uneducated.

[pron]

> robots seem mainly limited by software

First, I don't think so. Second, some resources would take even robots decades or centuries to collect. Even something as fundamental as energy production takes a lot of time and money to build. The question of where we'll get the energy to run the robots is not a simple one, and it's one of the simplest questions involved.

> I think that's what original comment was trying to argue, and I think it's possible within the limits you've laid out.

Possible isn't the same as likely, and the reason we don't extrapolate is that different extrapolations lead to very different results.

But regardless of what happens and when, I think that we, people educated in computer science, should remember that many questions are simply not answerable in a short amount of time, and we know with absolute certainty that answering them is not a question of intelligence but of computational power and time. We no that no human or machine, however intelligent, can predict or control the nonlinear systems that are all around us because they are computationally intractable.

[deterministic]

Thank you for posting such balanced and level headed comments. We need more of that on HN.