Another risk is that, as the singularity seems closer and closer, people are going to throw up their hands, stop learning math and science figuring the machines will do it all, and generally check out. If too many people do this too soon, sustainable recursive self-improvement won't happen and we'll be stuck with AI that doesn't quite work and nobody to fix it.
Chess is fun, but will people enjoy fixing old security bugs?
You could imagine an AI that's very good at adding features to itself, but just can't get security right because it doesn't think adversarially. Corporate software groups often have this same limitation.
I think the point was that we would have roughly the hardware needed to create superhuman AI. Then it would follow that "shortly after", someone would have figured out the rest.
At this point the most likely future looks like one where we use all of our resources, wreck the environment, and enter a new dark age. The potential benefits/dangers of AI seem distant in comparison.
I never hear about nature catching up to us- its always defeated and in the corner, we remain dominant. But as soon as society crumbles, meet those creatures and plants we couldnt get rid off- hyper adapted to resist us. Plants to which we are extremely allergic, who are resilient to all herbizides and selective bred for maximum spread into our ecologic niche. Animals, who by virtue of surviving in information dense environments, are very stealthy- and very clever. Carrying out of knowledge or instinct diseases and allergic contagions, to drive us further back into domes.
Most of our companion animals/plants unable to dwell in the open in the overheated world we created.
All the resources we had for the first attempt gone- no easy to reach oil, the best mines old landfills and destroyed citys.
In the video the author specifically talks why this is not a realistic scenario, plants we can't get rid off in our fields are specifically adapted to the way we handle the fields, without us they will be outcompeted by other plants, the domesticated plant and animal species will give the new civilization a huge head start as most of the time our civilization existed went into creating the species that are able to support civilization, old landfills and cities would be very good mines, lack of oil will be compensated by the remnants of our libraries describing other ways of getting energy.
> Plants ... who are resilient to all herbizides and selective bred for maximum spread into our ecologic niche.
Ironically one of such plants is Cyperus Rotundus, very useful in times of famine. Perhaps we are living in hyperopic age, where the obsession with economies of scale and controlled environments makes the immediate localized complexity into a high entropy nuisance worthy of destruction.
Some people like the dark ages. The advantage goes to aggression and physical strength. Some would rather compete in such a world. It could be why they seemingly battle against civilization.
I know this is totally not the point of TFA, the parent comment or yours, but apparently the current consensus is that there was no such thing as the "Dark Ages", and it wasn't a particularly illiterate or barbaric age: https://going-medieval.com/2017/05/26/theres-no-such-thing-a...
Fair enough – I was speaking in a more general sense. A better historical analogy would probably be something like the phenomenon Jared Diamond describes in his book "Collapse"[1].
No, even back then, as always, the advantages went to the rich and well connected.
I don't care much of a badass anarcho-primitivist some modern person thinks they are. They may think they would rise to the top like Genghis Khan if only they were free of the straightjacket of civilization and its morality, but almost all of them would really starve to death after a winter or die in a ditch of sepsis.
This kind of pessimism is not justified, environmental conditions near most large cities are much better than were in 50s, serious issues from climate change that can cause dark age are predicted to happen only after this century, if we keep doing what we are doing now, but by that time we'll have so many new technologies, that these predictions would look as unrealistic as the predictions from 1894 that "In 50 years, every street in London will be buried under nine feet of manure".
Vernor Vinge actually tells an interesting analogy in the last part of the video: the parable of blind tribe and the wise man. The blind sage of a blind tribe, gathers everyone and says, "my friends, i have found that we are living at the edge of the precipice, run for your lives!"
An hypothesis that cannot be falsified does not count as a scientific theory (according to Popper, not everyone agrees). That does not mean that is woo. It just means that it's outside the epistemological limits of science.
Another thing that is unmeasurable is science, and yet most people don't doubt it.
> The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.
Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists, it also sparked tremendously bizarre offshoot beliefs, like that "Roko's Basilisk" meme that the "Eliezer Yudkowsky" crowd was briefly obsessed with.
"Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists"
I also don't understand this statement. I asked the parent about why the singularity and AGI are "the apocalypse" for atheists, but I also don't follow the logic of this statement. Granted, I don't think there will ever be a "singularity", but I fail to see how it is in any way linked to atheism. Maybe a small subset of people, like you said, a "bizarre offshoot".
Ah, yes. Sorry, I'm an atheist myself and I can see how my sentence could be misconstrued.
Let me rephrase: there's a bunch of Silicon Valley technologists and like-minded people, who consider themselves enlightened atheists, and who have fallen prey to a different kind of religion: an apocalyptic tech-religion with a set of distinct beliefs such as the Coming of the Singularity, the Evil AI, the Upload Your Mind to the Cloud and Live Forever cult, etc. Not everyone believes in the same subset, and not everyone believes in the more bizarre of these beliefs.
As an atheist myself, I definitely didn't mean that all or even the majority of atheists will fall for this. I meant that a specific subset of tech-minded, nerd, and likely well-to-do atheists tend to fall for these techno-religions.
It's a "religion for atheists" because it's a religion that tries to hide the trappings of a more traditional religion, for people who presumably reject them and who don't consider themselves open to new age pseudoscience either. But tell me it's not cute how Ray Kurzweil has faith in reaching immortality (salvation) in his own lifetime.
Thanks for the explanation. I agree there's a small group of virtual-theists like Kurzweil, he's been a bit off kilter for many, many years. I'd love to upload my mind into VR when my meatbag expires, but the chances of that happening in my life are near zero, and not much better for brain uploading in general, IMO.
There are several different types each of which has its own testable predictions. I can’t play the linked video, but given this is Vernor Vinge, the prediction would be “a computer which is just as good at designing chips as a human, so when Moore’s law doubles its speed, it now takes half as long to reach the next double-performance design”.
> The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.
I don't follow the logic of this statement. I'm an atheist, and while I don't believe there will ever be any "singularity", I also don't understand how the impacts of AGI would be different for theists versus non-theists. Could you explain?
The logic is that people have always found ideas about the end of world, heaven, salvation, immortality, enticing. Singularity predicts analogs of these things in a manner that is compatible with atheism, so some atheists believe there will be singularity soon, for the same reasons some religious people believe the end of the world is near.
I don't think that the above is good enough reason to dismiss the whole idea of singularity, but it is a good explanation why more people tend to predict singularity, instead of "viscosity" where improvements become harder and harder to do and AGI is needed to simply keep the same pace.
I really like Vernor Vinge's fiction, and he's got some really big ideas, but sometimes in contexts like these I'm surprised by how shallow and provincial the thinking is. He seems unable to step out the present western 20th/21st century worldview.
The singularity (if it comes) should feature intelligences whose modes and motivations are so superior and advanced, they are literally incomprehensible to us. Questions like "Will the machines allow humans to live?" are ill-posed. As human philosophers can't agree on the meaning or the existence of free will, will the machines? Will they have will, free or otherwise? Or is free will itself the mere shadow on the wall of the a richer thing that we can't truly, ever comprehend? So talking about what the machines/intelligences 'want' is getting ahead of ourselves.
Possibly Vinge is well aware that a superior intelligence would be incomprehensible, but he just hasn't figured out how to write a compelling story about that.
> Questions like "Will the machines allow humans to live?" are ill-posed.
I don't think so. Even if the machine doesn't care about you (it may not even have a notion of what is a human), you are still made of atoms it could use for something else.
Are you still a living human if it just shoops you off into a virtual world indistinguishable from your current one, so it can use your atoms for something more productive? What about if you upgrade yourself to the point where you're no longer made of mortal meat?
> Are you still a living human if it just shoops you off into a virtual world indistinguishable from your current one
As far as I can assess, yes I am. (For a couple reasons, including my disbelief in philosophical zombies, I believe in mind uploading).
> so it can use your atoms for something more productive?
Wait a minute, running a Matrix takes energy no matter how you put it. Energy the machine could use for something else… If the machine doesn't care about me, why would it even bother? It would just take the atoms and discard any information (that is, me) that it does not need. Running a Matrix is a strong indication that the machine does, in fact, care about me.
> What about if you upgrade yourself to the point where you're no longer made of mortal meat?
That's more delicate. I'm not sure exactly what would ensure the continuity of my identity. Mere mind uploading most likely would, but upgrades to my own brain… I think the answer will depend on what neurosciences and such tell us.
For the second one I feel that a combination of scientific curiosity and altruism would be enough for most AIs up to the weakly godlike level to keep us around.
For the third, I don't think continuity can be a significant factor in identity, because even we as meat-humans don't experience it, and given the possibility of physically-indistinguishable duplicates, it leans on Cartesian dualism. Also once we can upload our mind to a data file, it does weird things to a whole bunch of current morals which are based on the scarcity of any given human mind.
Some of the worst human beings I've ever encountered were also extremely talented and intelligent engineers. There is zero reason to assume a hyperintelligent AI would automatically be altruistic.
More specifically, the AI is likely to be scientifically curious because it is a likely way to further its goals: understand the universe so it can be more efficient at doing whatever it is it is programmed to do.
Altruism on the other hand sounds more like an end goal, not just an instrumental, intermediate goal. Unless the AI is specifically programmed to be altruist, it will likely be utterly indifferent. Which if it becomes powerful enough will be more like trampling an ant without even noticing it.
Then comes the really difficult part: programming altruism. What does that mean exactly? Ultimately, it boils down to tell the AI what we want, except we don't exactly know what we want, let alone what we will want once we learn more, become wiser etc. We don't want the AI to keep us in soft rooms with children toys and morphine shots just because we asked it to keep us safe and happy…
No, AI will desperately want sex, money, and lebensraum, just like human dictators. It won't think of either humanity or self-preservation as completely irrelevant and not interesting.
Singularity talk is just projection and self-idealization. "AI will be like me, but perfect, and infinitely more capable of doing what I would do if I were omnipotent, which it will decide to do faster than I could ever make a decision."
I think part of the problem with the question is that intelligence and motivations/drives are orthogonal. Intelligence is just a means to an end, it says nothing about the end to which it is a means. To say that a being is vastly more intelligent than human beings (super-intelligent) says nothing about what motivations it may have. Our own motivations are mostly given to us by our genetic and cultural inheritance, rather than something we've constructed for ourselves by our own intelligence.
I think it likely, that any super-intelligent AI created by human beings, will be given motivations which somehow reflect the motivations and values of its creators. Not necessarily exactly the same – a silicon-based life-form has no need for food or sex as carbon-based life-forms do – but, I think a super-intelligent AI created by humans will likely be given motivations to seek to favour the interests of its creators, whether "its creators" are construed broadly (all of humanity as a whole) or narrowly (just the individual or corporation or nation-state which creates it.)
Ok, I have this theory and it's probably kinda ignorant, so I welcome some criticism.
It looks like biological intelligence is purely a product of having an electrical network with tons of connections. That's the brain, right? And less intelligent species have less connections, so we can probably draw a straight line from low intellect - low connectivity to high intellect - high connectivity. My argument is that intelligence is a product of the complexity of an electrical network.
So will machine intelligence be purely a product of creating an electrical network with tons of connections? If I took billions of computers, wrote some basic logic for how they communicated with each other, and then wired it all up, would I get an intelligent being?
If those suppositions hold true, then all we need to do to reach AGI is to continue to invest in the internet (as it is the most advanced electrical network we've made to date). Continue to add more computers and continue to remove hindrances to the operation of the network (censorship, rate limiting, political logic). Then it will just magically wake up one day and say "hello world".
A neuron uses far more than electricity to communicate. The number of neurotransmitters and receptor types alone is staggering. There’s a reason why biology evolved past using gap junctions. The computer science view of the brain compares how the brain works to FLOPS, much like how previous generations compared the brain to horsepower from the steam engine. Better analogy, but still naive.
This is an important thing that optimists often miss. If you naively apply simple estimates of how many flops it takes to simulate a mind… well, I have and it would be possible to put ~35,000 real-time human minds onto all the iPhones Apple sold this year: https://kitsunesoftware.wordpress.com/2018/10/01/pocket-brai...
There’s also the problem that we don’t yet know how ignorant we are about our minds. I’m sure neuroscientists do at least have a rough idea by now of how much there is left to learn, but I’d be surprised if they are confident enough to be able to estimate the cost of the remaining required research to less than a factor of 10, especially as we necessarily started with the easy-to-learn knowledge.
Aren't neurotransmitters and receptors just smaller forms of electrical connections? A neurotransmitter is a chemical that causes a reaction in the receptor. You could argue that a chemical reaction is a data exchange, and a data exchange is just a type of electrical connection.
I'm getting a bit reductionist with my theory, admittedly...
Visions of the Singularity in the near term failed to account for two things: 1) obtaining regulatory approval for innovations in various spheres (medicine, aviation) takes forever, 2) innovations that rely on the consumer market are slowed by people wanting to use their present purchases for some amount of time before shelling out again for the next generation of tech.
An exponentially faster development of technology is limited by how fast the workings of government agencies and consumers' minds operate.
I rolled my eyes when I read Kurzweil's predictions of medical advances in his early-millennium books. Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very moment they are invented.
Anything that depends on current high tech or advanced manufacturing (a good portion of imaging technologies, many implants) would definitely not been around 30, let alone 50 years ago.
I don't see this. I would expect the Singularity to be mostly powered by hardware, software, robotics, and manufacturing, all of which are lightly regulated.
obtaining regulatory approval for innovations in various spheres (medicine, aviation) takes forever
If regulatory approval is the real bottleneck then there would be a rapidly-growing backlog of technologies that have been invented but not approved. Do we see that?
people wanting to use their present purchases for some amount of time before shelling out again for the next generation of tech
People are keeping iPhones for 4-5 years instead of 2 years but Apple still has enough R&D budget to release a new model every year.
> Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very moment they are invented.
I've often wondered if countries (such as maybe China or India) where medical devices/pharmaceuticals/etc are more lightly regulated may some day end up pulling ahead of countries like the US with stricter regulations.
Of course, stricter regulations exist for a reason – to reduce incidence of death or injury from insufficiently tested treatments. But, there is always a risk-reward tradeoff–being willing to tolerate a greater incidence of death/injury due to new treatments may increase the progress of medical science–and some societies may collectively decide to locate that tradeoff at a different position than what the US (or even other Western countries) does.
...
Or you know large scale existential crisis. Nanotechnology is freaky man. Could be the easiest way for reality to be rewritten without anyone noticing..
There's a more basic problem - the Singularity assumes automated self-improvement is possible.
The reality is that most codebases are brittle and bug-ridden. Poor reliability is one the defining characteristics of software systems.
The most reliable systems require formal methods, which require a nailed-down spec. There is no nailed-down spec for an open-ended self-improving system, and it's debatable if a spec is even possible.
So the only practical systems will be heuristic and inherently unreliable in at least some domains, with a tendency to fail spectacularly - much like humans.
This is a basic limitation of technology. You can have mechanical perfection in a limited domain (although with software you often you get a poor imitation of that) or you can trade off flexibility for reliability.
The singularity isn’t happening because the concept of exponential technological growth is, as a general matter, wrong. In any given area, technology improves rapidly, then plateaus. (From 1903-1969, we went from the Wright Flyer to a moon landing. In a similar period after that, our technological capability in that area has barely advanced.) It’s not like there is incredible technology that’s just sitting around waiting for regulatory approval.
Vinge’s definition of the singularity is the creation of human-level AI. After we have superhuman AI governments will be irrelevant. What ever the AI wants it gets.
To me a singularity does not seem to be approaching. In particular it doesn’t seem like technology is “accelerating faster and faster”. The broadest metric for human progress is GDP growth, and in the U.S. GDP growth hasn’t really been accelerating, it’s been around 2.5% a year for the past decade or so.
AI in particular has made some advances but most basic activities remain undoable. AI cannot fold my laundry or generate a believable sentence well enough for those features to make their way into a consumer product. Voice recognition like Alexa is the only big impact of AI so far, which places it below advances like “touch screen glass” in terms of its impact on society.
It could certainly change. The biggest question right now is whether self driving cars will work, or whether it will fizzle. In the 50’s many car companies thought the next step was inevitably personal airplanes, and that fizzled. So it’s possible it just won’t happen.
Really? How much progress was made on thinking machines in the 19th century? How much between 1900 and 1950? 1950 and 2000? 2000 and 2010? 2010 and now?
I think each of those timespans is very roughly equivalent. In the past 10 years voice recognition has gone from useless to ubiquitous. Neural image labeling and segmentation likewise. Physical robots have gone from taking a few faltering steps to doing parkour. None of that counts as "AI" any more because it works and we know how, but the rate at which new capabilities are moving from the realm of "AI" to the realm of "normal engineering" is increasing exponentially.
I agree that technology isn't progressing "faster and faster," but GDP doesn't measure technological progress. That is absurd. It doesn't even measure economic growth very well, and even if it did that wouldn't mean technological progress would track it. Technological progress can happen even during a recession, and often has.
GDP measures the value of monetized final goods in an economy. Linux and Wikipedia have thus reduced the GDP, because they displaced a huge chunk of existing markets that used to be monetized.
GDP is useful for monetary policy conducted at central banks, primarily.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 158 ms ] threadYou could imagine an AI that's very good at adding features to itself, but just can't get security right because it doesn't think adversarially. Corporate software groups often have this same limitation.
https://edoras.sdsu.edu/~vinge/misc/singularity.html
Four years to go... will we make it?
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/609038/chinas-ai-awakenin...
To return from such a dark age, seems unlikely.
Ironically one of such plants is Cyperus Rotundus, very useful in times of famine. Perhaps we are living in hyperopic age, where the obsession with economies of scale and controlled environments makes the immediate localized complexity into a high entropy nuisance worthy of destruction.
Note this doesn't require AGI, just basic machine learning finding ways to push our buttons to make us click more buttons...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collapse:_How_Societies_Choose...
Your link is interesting, I didn't know about that book!
I don't think that's true: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/15/were-there-dark-ages/
Of course, I don't claim to be an expert myself and can't readily judge which of the two articles is more accurate.
I don't care much of a badass anarcho-primitivist some modern person thinks they are. They may think they would rise to the top like Genghis Khan if only they were free of the straightjacket of civilization and its morality, but almost all of them would really starve to death after a winter or die in a ditch of sepsis.
The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.
An hypothesis that cannot be falsified does not count as a scientific theory (according to Popper, not everyone agrees). That does not mean that is woo. It just means that it's outside the epistemological limits of science.
Another thing that is unmeasurable is science, and yet most people don't doubt it.
> The singularity and AGI are apocalypse for atheists.
I agree with that to a degree.
Not only is the Singularity religion for atheists, it also sparked tremendously bizarre offshoot beliefs, like that "Roko's Basilisk" meme that the "Eliezer Yudkowsky" crowd was briefly obsessed with.
I also don't understand this statement. I asked the parent about why the singularity and AGI are "the apocalypse" for atheists, but I also don't follow the logic of this statement. Granted, I don't think there will ever be a "singularity", but I fail to see how it is in any way linked to atheism. Maybe a small subset of people, like you said, a "bizarre offshoot".
Let me rephrase: there's a bunch of Silicon Valley technologists and like-minded people, who consider themselves enlightened atheists, and who have fallen prey to a different kind of religion: an apocalyptic tech-religion with a set of distinct beliefs such as the Coming of the Singularity, the Evil AI, the Upload Your Mind to the Cloud and Live Forever cult, etc. Not everyone believes in the same subset, and not everyone believes in the more bizarre of these beliefs.
As an atheist myself, I definitely didn't mean that all or even the majority of atheists will fall for this. I meant that a specific subset of tech-minded, nerd, and likely well-to-do atheists tend to fall for these techno-religions.
It's a "religion for atheists" because it's a religion that tries to hide the trappings of a more traditional religion, for people who presumably reject them and who don't consider themselves open to new age pseudoscience either. But tell me it's not cute how Ray Kurzweil has faith in reaching immortality (salvation) in his own lifetime.
I don't follow the logic of this statement. I'm an atheist, and while I don't believe there will ever be any "singularity", I also don't understand how the impacts of AGI would be different for theists versus non-theists. Could you explain?
I don't think that the above is good enough reason to dismiss the whole idea of singularity, but it is a good explanation why more people tend to predict singularity, instead of "viscosity" where improvements become harder and harder to do and AGI is needed to simply keep the same pace.
The singularity (if it comes) should feature intelligences whose modes and motivations are so superior and advanced, they are literally incomprehensible to us. Questions like "Will the machines allow humans to live?" are ill-posed. As human philosophers can't agree on the meaning or the existence of free will, will the machines? Will they have will, free or otherwise? Or is free will itself the mere shadow on the wall of the a richer thing that we can't truly, ever comprehend? So talking about what the machines/intelligences 'want' is getting ahead of ourselves.
I don't think so. Even if the machine doesn't care about you (it may not even have a notion of what is a human), you are still made of atoms it could use for something else.
As far as I can assess, yes I am. (For a couple reasons, including my disbelief in philosophical zombies, I believe in mind uploading).
> so it can use your atoms for something more productive?
Wait a minute, running a Matrix takes energy no matter how you put it. Energy the machine could use for something else… If the machine doesn't care about me, why would it even bother? It would just take the atoms and discard any information (that is, me) that it does not need. Running a Matrix is a strong indication that the machine does, in fact, care about me.
> What about if you upgrade yourself to the point where you're no longer made of mortal meat?
That's more delicate. I'm not sure exactly what would ensure the continuity of my identity. Mere mind uploading most likely would, but upgrades to my own brain… I think the answer will depend on what neurosciences and such tell us.
For the second one I feel that a combination of scientific curiosity and altruism would be enough for most AIs up to the weakly godlike level to keep us around.
For the third, I don't think continuity can be a significant factor in identity, because even we as meat-humans don't experience it, and given the possibility of physically-indistinguishable duplicates, it leans on Cartesian dualism. Also once we can upload our mind to a data file, it does weird things to a whole bunch of current morals which are based on the scarcity of any given human mind.
Some of the worst human beings I've ever encountered were also extremely talented and intelligent engineers. There is zero reason to assume a hyperintelligent AI would automatically be altruistic.
Altruism on the other hand sounds more like an end goal, not just an instrumental, intermediate goal. Unless the AI is specifically programmed to be altruist, it will likely be utterly indifferent. Which if it becomes powerful enough will be more like trampling an ant without even noticing it.
Then comes the really difficult part: programming altruism. What does that mean exactly? Ultimately, it boils down to tell the AI what we want, except we don't exactly know what we want, let alone what we will want once we learn more, become wiser etc. We don't want the AI to keep us in soft rooms with children toys and morphine shots just because we asked it to keep us safe and happy…
Singularity talk is just projection and self-idealization. "AI will be like me, but perfect, and infinitely more capable of doing what I would do if I were omnipotent, which it will decide to do faster than I could ever make a decision."
I think it likely, that any super-intelligent AI created by human beings, will be given motivations which somehow reflect the motivations and values of its creators. Not necessarily exactly the same – a silicon-based life-form has no need for food or sex as carbon-based life-forms do – but, I think a super-intelligent AI created by humans will likely be given motivations to seek to favour the interests of its creators, whether "its creators" are construed broadly (all of humanity as a whole) or narrowly (just the individual or corporation or nation-state which creates it.)
It looks like biological intelligence is purely a product of having an electrical network with tons of connections. That's the brain, right? And less intelligent species have less connections, so we can probably draw a straight line from low intellect - low connectivity to high intellect - high connectivity. My argument is that intelligence is a product of the complexity of an electrical network.
So will machine intelligence be purely a product of creating an electrical network with tons of connections? If I took billions of computers, wrote some basic logic for how they communicated with each other, and then wired it all up, would I get an intelligent being?
If those suppositions hold true, then all we need to do to reach AGI is to continue to invest in the internet (as it is the most advanced electrical network we've made to date). Continue to add more computers and continue to remove hindrances to the operation of the network (censorship, rate limiting, political logic). Then it will just magically wake up one day and say "hello world".
There’s also the problem that we don’t yet know how ignorant we are about our minds. I’m sure neuroscientists do at least have a rough idea by now of how much there is left to learn, but I’d be surprised if they are confident enough to be able to estimate the cost of the remaining required research to less than a factor of 10, especially as we necessarily started with the easy-to-learn knowledge.
I'm getting a bit reductionist with my theory, admittedly...
An exponentially faster development of technology is limited by how fast the workings of government agencies and consumers' minds operate.
I rolled my eyes when I read Kurzweil's predictions of medical advances in his early-millennium books. Even if we invent nanobots or whatever so quickly, the FDA and its counterparts are not going to allow applying those technologies the very moment they are invented.
And probably for very good reasons.
All our current medical technologies a way to late to the party, if anything else we should've have them 50 years ago.
In addition many things require experiments or building large scale factories/businesses and those take time.
obtaining regulatory approval for innovations in various spheres (medicine, aviation) takes forever
If regulatory approval is the real bottleneck then there would be a rapidly-growing backlog of technologies that have been invented but not approved. Do we see that?
people wanting to use their present purchases for some amount of time before shelling out again for the next generation of tech
People are keeping iPhones for 4-5 years instead of 2 years but Apple still has enough R&D budget to release a new model every year.
I've often wondered if countries (such as maybe China or India) where medical devices/pharmaceuticals/etc are more lightly regulated may some day end up pulling ahead of countries like the US with stricter regulations.
Of course, stricter regulations exist for a reason – to reduce incidence of death or injury from insufficiently tested treatments. But, there is always a risk-reward tradeoff–being willing to tolerate a greater incidence of death/injury due to new treatments may increase the progress of medical science–and some societies may collectively decide to locate that tradeoff at a different position than what the US (or even other Western countries) does.
... Or you know large scale existential crisis. Nanotechnology is freaky man. Could be the easiest way for reality to be rewritten without anyone noticing..
The reality is that most codebases are brittle and bug-ridden. Poor reliability is one the defining characteristics of software systems.
The most reliable systems require formal methods, which require a nailed-down spec. There is no nailed-down spec for an open-ended self-improving system, and it's debatable if a spec is even possible.
So the only practical systems will be heuristic and inherently unreliable in at least some domains, with a tendency to fail spectacularly - much like humans.
This is a basic limitation of technology. You can have mechanical perfection in a limited domain (although with software you often you get a poor imitation of that) or you can trade off flexibility for reliability.
You can't have both.
AI in particular has made some advances but most basic activities remain undoable. AI cannot fold my laundry or generate a believable sentence well enough for those features to make their way into a consumer product. Voice recognition like Alexa is the only big impact of AI so far, which places it below advances like “touch screen glass” in terms of its impact on society.
It could certainly change. The biggest question right now is whether self driving cars will work, or whether it will fizzle. In the 50’s many car companies thought the next step was inevitably personal airplanes, and that fizzled. So it’s possible it just won’t happen.
I think each of those timespans is very roughly equivalent. In the past 10 years voice recognition has gone from useless to ubiquitous. Neural image labeling and segmentation likewise. Physical robots have gone from taking a few faltering steps to doing parkour. None of that counts as "AI" any more because it works and we know how, but the rate at which new capabilities are moving from the realm of "AI" to the realm of "normal engineering" is increasing exponentially.
GDP measures the value of monetized final goods in an economy. Linux and Wikipedia have thus reduced the GDP, because they displaced a huge chunk of existing markets that used to be monetized.
GDP is useful for monetary policy conducted at central banks, primarily.