[mattj]

The AI winter is very much over, and we're back to the good old days of selling the future. I bet this team is very sharp, but there's still merit to "over-promise, under-deliver."

"Phoenix, the co-founder, says Vicarious aims beyond image recognition. He said the next milestone will be creating a computer that can understand not just shapes and objects, but the textures associated with them. For example, a computer might understand “chair.” It might also comprehend “ice.” Vicarious wants to create a computer that will understand a request like “show me a chair made of ice.”

Phoenix hopes that, eventually, Vicarious’s computers will learn to how to cure diseases, create cheap, renewable energy, and perform the jobs that employ most human beings. “We tell investors that right now, human beings are doing a lot of things that computers should be able to do,” he says."

[samstave]

Funny to think that instead of curing diseases or making cheap renewable energy, we'd instead try to spend resources to invent a computer to do that for us...

[loup-vaillant]

Higher order strategy.

We do that for ourselves when we learn first about something, plan ahead, and then do it. Thing is, we don't know how to cure diseases, we don't know how to make cheap renewable energy, and we certainly don't know how to turn Earth into Heaven. The direct approach might very well be harder than the AI one.

[johnrob]

Why do you think our creators made the simulated universe we live in? There's an infinite-loop bug, however: each simulation tries to solve the real problem by creating a sub-simulation.

[0003]

Now you have infinite problems.

[bitcuration]

That's not infinite loop bug, that's recursion. Usually an exit condition will get out of the loop. In this case, sounds like once found solution to cure disease and new energy, the condition is met. Yes?

[Houshalter]

Well it is incredibly dangerous, but if we did make safe, super intelligent AI, it would definitely be a much greater investment than directly working on those problems.

To put it lightly, it would automate and massively bring down the cost/increase the speed of research and engineering. Sure enough money, spent on enough humans, given enough time, could eventually find a cure for any disease. But why do that when you can just ask the AI and have a cure overnight?

Of course it's not clear how safe such an AI would be (such a being could easily outsmart us and get what it wants, whatever that even is), nor how difficult it will be to create one.

[throwaway7808]

Well, let's hope they will go broke wasting money into the AI research black hole before being able to actually build one :) Otherwise, you are correct. A successful built of super intelligent AI is probably an extinction event for the humans.

[ra88it]

After super intelligent AI, what's special about humans?

[Houshalter]

Define "special". I don't want to be killed to make way for more paperclips.

[JabavuAdams]

We still have pets, and they're rather well taken care of.

[Houshalter]

That's just another human weakness - we anthropomorphize lesser creatures. And even with that, we still don't look before stepping on ants.

[enupten]

Realistically though, a super intelligent AI, would require far more fundamental breakthroughs. People who say otherwise, should take a look at problems in Control theory.

The effect of scaling things up should be interesting though. Perhaps there is a "Phase transition" like thing, where suddenly something awesome happens. This also means that, sadly, Universities would no longer be able to provide adequate resources for research.

[Houshalter]

What makes you say that? It may seem that it would take a lot of work, but really, how can we know? Often times difficult problems seem obvious in retrospect.

[carlmcqueen]

NASAs goal to go to the moon brought a lot of the innovations we enjoy in our day to day lives.

[danso]

So the question you should be asking is...if everyone agrees that cheap renewable energy and curing diseases is a good thing, why haven't we done it yet? I guess if you're cynical, you'd argue, because no one can make a profit from it (uh...right).

However, if you see it as a pragmatic problem, then maybe the answer to why not? is because we need better ways to process information -- and this kind of unsupervised machine learning is critical to doing that.

[samstave]

Yes, know, i just found the phrase funny.

[icefox]

Why is curing all diseases a good thing?

[baddox]

Because, unless you're using a specially crafted definition of the term, diseases are all bad.

[MacsHeadroom]

Is being unhealthy good? Do you enjoy being ill?

[aviraldg]

I've given some thought to this, and the answer is it might be. Consider a future where we've managed to eliminate all diseases. By then our natural resistance to disease might have atrophied to a point where we will absolutely be unprepared to deal with new diseases (biologically), before we've managed to develop a cure for them.

[otikik]

It makes sense to invest on a plow instead of keeping hunting and gathering.

[zxcvvcxz]

Not to be cynical, but isn't this whole thing a glorified research project with founders that can sound visionary? Maybe that's a good formula.

[neutronicus]

I assume you meant "under-promise, over-deliver".

[cpeterso]

Probably, but it's easier to get funding or acquired if you over-promise (and inevitably under-deliver).

[enupten]

I wish instead of making computers do things that Humans are doing, people put more effort into making the Humans' job, instructing these stupid beasts (I mean the computers), easier.

[gambogi]

mutually exclusive endeavors etc etc