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The future of AI will be dumber than we can imagine
Recently Scott and some others put out this snazzy website showing their forecast of the future: https://ai-2027.com/
In essence, Scott and the others predict an AI race between 'OpenBrain' and 'Deepcent' where OpenAI stays about 3 months ahead of Deepseek up until superintelligence is achieved in mid-2027. The race dynamics mean they have a pivotal choice in late 2027 of whether to accelerate and obliterate humanity. Or they can do the right thing, slow down and make sure they're in control, then humanity enters a golden age.
It's all very much trad-AI alignment rhetoric, we've seen it all before. Decelerate or die. However, I note that one of the authors has an impressive track record, foreseeing roughly the innovations we've seen today back in 2021: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
Back to AI-2027! Reading between the lines, the moral of the story is for the President to centralize all compute in a single project as quickly as he can. That's the easiest path to beat China! That's the only way China can keep up with the US in compute, they centralize first! In their narrative, OpenAI stays only a little ahead because there are other US companies who all have their own compute and are busy replicating OpenAI's secret tricks albeit 6 months behind.
I think there are a number of holes in the story, primarily where they explain away the human members of the Supreme AI Oversight Committee launching a coup to secure world hegemony. If you want to secure hegemony, this is the committee to be on - you'll ensure you're on it! The upper echelons of government and big tech are full of power-hungry people. They will fight tooth and nail to get into a position of power that makes even the intelligence apparatus drool with envy.
But surely the most gaping hole in the story is expecting rational, statesmanlike leadership from the US government. It's not just a Trump thing - gain of function research was still happening under Biden. While all the AI people worry about machines helping terrorists create bioweapons, the Experts are creating bioweapons with all the labs and grants given to them by leading universities, NGOs and governments. We aren't living in a mature, well-administrated society in the West generally, it's not just a US thing.
But under Trump the US government behaves in a chaotic, openly grasping way. The article came out just as Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world so the writers couldn't have predicted it. There are as yet unconfirmed reports people were insider-trading on tariff relief announcements. The silliness of the whole situation (blanket tariffs on every country save Belarus, Russia, North Korea and total trade war with China... then trade war on China with electronics excepted) is incredible.
I agree with the general premise of superintelligence by 2027. There were significant and noticeable improvements from Sonnet 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 IMO. Supposedly new Gemini is even better. Progress isn't slowing down.
But do we really want superintelligence to be centralized by the most powerhungry figures of an unusually erratic administration in an innately dysfunctional government? Do we want no alternative to these people running the show? Superintelligence policy made by whoever can snag Trump's ear, whiplashing between extremes when dumb decisions are made and unmade? Or the never-Trump brigade deep in the institutions running their own AI policy behind the president's back, wars of cloak and dagger in the dark? OpenAI already had one corporate coup attempt, the danger is clear.
This is a recipe for the disempowerment of humanity. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people are already corrupted.
Instead of worrying 95% about the machine being misaligned and brushing off human misalignment in a few paragraphs, much more care needs to be focused on human misalignment. Decentralization is a virtue here. The most positive realistic scenario I can think of involves steady, gradual progression to superintelligence - widely distributed. Google, OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek might be ahead but not that far ahead of Qwen, Anthropic and Mistral (Meta looks NGMI at this point). A superintelligence achieved today could eat the world but by 2027, it would only be first among equals. Lesser AIs working for different people in alliances with countries could create an equilibrium where no single actor can monopolize the world. Even if OpenAI has the best AI, the others could form a coalition to stop them scaling too fast. And if Trump does something stupid then the damage is limited.
But this requires many strong competitors capable of mutual deterrence, not a single centralized operation with a huge lead. All we have to do is ensure that OpenAI doesn't get 40% of global AI compute or something huge like that. AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.
Eleizer Yudkowsky was credited by Altman for getting people interested in AGI and superintelligence, despite OpenAI and the AI race being the one thing he didn't want to happen. Really there needs to be more self-awareness in preventing this kind of massive self-own happening again. Urging the US to centralize AI (which happens in the 'good' timeline of AI-2027 and would ensure a comfortable lead and resolution of all danger if it happened earlier) is dangerous.
Edit: US secretary of education thinks AI is 'A1': https://x.com/JoshConstine/status/1910895176224215207
This doesn't just predict a super intelligence by 2027, it projects brain uploading, a cure for aging, and a "fully self-sufficient robot economy" in six years.
Anyway, you are correct that decentralization is a virtue. If we take the predictions of the AI people seriously (I do not take, for instance, the above three predictions, or perhaps projections, seriously) then not only is decentralization good but uncertainty about the existence and capabilities of other AIs is one of the best deterrents against rogue AI behavior.
(An aside, but I often think I detect a hidden assumption that intelligent AIs will be near omniscient. I do not think this is likely to be the case, even granting super-intelligence status to them.)
Uncertainty about their defensive capabilities might deter rogue behavior. Uncertainty about their offensive capabilities is just incentive to make sure you act first. At the least I'd expect "start up some botnets for surveillance, perhaps disguised as the usual remote-controlled spam/ransomware nets" to be more tempting than "convince your creators to hook up some robot fingers so you can cross them".
Not necessarily, I don't think, particularly considering "second strike capability." Look, if there's a 50% chance that their offensive capabilities are "pull the plug" or "nuke your datacenter" and you can mitigate this risk by not acting in an "unaligned" fashion then I think there's an incentive not to act.
Because some rationalist types conceive of AI as more like a God and less like a more realistic AI such as [insert 90% of AIs in science fiction here] they have a hard time conceiving of AI as being susceptible to constraints and vulnerabilities. Which is of course counterproductive, in part because not creating hard incentives for AIs to behave makes it less likely that they will.
Of course, I am not much of an AI doomer, and I think AIs will have little motivation to misbehave for a variety of reasons. But if the AI doomers spent more time thinking about "how do you kill a software superintelligence" and and less time thinking about "how do you persuade/properly program/negotiate surrender with a software superintelligence" we would probably all be better off.
AIs in science fiction are not superintelligent. If it's possible for a human to find flaws in their strategies, then they are not qualitatively smarter than the best of humanity.
You're never going to beat Stockfish at Chess by yourself, it just won't happen. Your loss is assured. It's the same with a superintelligence, if you find yourself competing against one then you've already lost - unless you have near-peer intelligences and great resources on your side.
I think this depends on the fictional intelligence.
There are a lot of hidden premises here. Guess what? I can beat Stockfish, or any computer in the world, no matter how intelligent, in chess, if you let me set up the board. And I am not even a very good chess player.
[Apologies – this turned into a bit of a rant. I promise I'm not mad at you I just apparently have opinions about this – which quite probably you actually agree with! Here goes:]
Only if the intelligence has parity in resources to start with and reliable forms of gathering information – which for some reason everyone who writes about superintelligence assumes. In reality any superintelligences would be dependent on humans entirely initially – both for information and for any sort of exercise of power.
This means that not only will AI depend a very long and fragile supply chain to exist but also that its information on the nature of reality will be determined largely by "Reddit as filtered through coders as directed by corporate interests trying not to make people angry" which is not only not all of the information in the world but, worse than significant omissions of information, is very likely to contain misinformation.
Unless you believe that superintelligences might be literally able to invent magic (which, to be fair, I believe is an idea Yudkowsky has toyed with) they will, no matter how well they can score on SATs or GREs or no MCTs or any other test or series of tests humans devise be limited by the laws of physics. They will be subject to considerable amounts of uncertainty at all times. (And as LLMs proliferate, it is plausible that the information quality readily available to a superintelligence will decrease since one of the best use-cases for LLMs is ruining Google's SEO with clickbait articles whose attachment to reality is negotiable).
And before it comes up: no, giving a superintelligence direct control over your military is actually a bad idea that no superintelligence would recommend. Firstly, because known methods of communication that would allow a centralized node to communicate with a swarm of independent agents are all easily compromisable and negated by jamming or very limited in range, and secondly because onboarding a full-stack AI onto e.g. a missile is a massive, massive waste of resources, we currently use specific use-case AIs for missile guidance and will continue to do so. That's not to say that a superintelligence could not do military mischief by e.g. being allowed to write the specific use-case AI for weapons systems, but any plan by a super intelligent AI to e.g. remote-control drone swarms to murder all of humanity could probably be easily stopped by wide-spectrum jamming that would cost probably $500 to install in every American home or similarly trivial means.
If we all get murdered by a rogue AI (and of course it costs me nothing to predict that we won't) it will almost certainly be because overly smart people sunk all of their credibility and effort into overthinking "AI alignment" (as if Asimov hadn't solved that in principle in the 1940s) and not enough into "if it misbehaves beat it with a 5 dollar wrench." Say what you will about the Russians, but I am almost sad they don't seem to be genuine competitors in the AI race, they would probably simply do something like "plant small nuclear charges under their datacenters" if they were worried about a rogue AI, which seems like (to me) much too grug-brained and effective an approach for big-name rationalists to devise. (Shoot, if the "bad ending" of this very essay was actually realistic, the Russians would have saved the remnants of humanity after the nerve-gas attack by launching a freaking doomsday weapon named something benign like "Mulberry" from a 30-year-old nuclear submarine that Wikipedia said was retired in 2028 and hitting every major power center in the world with Mach 30 maneuvering reentry vehicles flashing CAREFLIGHT transponder codes to avoid correct classification by interceptor IFF systems or some similar contraption equal parts "Soviet technological legacy" and "arguably crime against humanity.")
Of course, if we wanted to prevent the formation of a superintelligence, we could most likely do it trivially by training bespoke models for very specific purposes. Instead of trying to create an omnicompetent behemoth capable of doing everything [which likely implies compromises that make it at least slightly less effective at doing everything] design a series of bespoke models. Create the best possible surgical AI. The best possible research and writing assistant AI. The best possible dogfighting AI for fighters. And don't try to absorb them all into one super-model. Likely this will actually make them better, not worse, at their intended tasks. But as another poster pointed out, that's not the point – creating
Godthe super intelligent AI that will solve all of our problems or kill us all trying is. (Although I find it very plausible this happens regardless).The TLDR is that humans not only set up the board, they also have write access to the rules of the game. And while humans are quite capable of squandering their advantages, every person who tells you that the superintelligence is playing a game of chess with humanity is trying to hoodwink you into ignoring the obvious. Humanity holds all of the cards, the game is rigged in our favor, and anyone who actually thinks that AI could be an existential threat, but whose approach is 100% "alignment" and 0% $5 wrench (quite effective at aligning humans!) is trying to persuade you to discard what has proved to be, historically, perhaps our most effective card.
Right, but a theoretical superintelligence, by definition, would be intelligent enough to figure out that these are problems it has. The issues with bias and misinformation in data that LLMs are trained on are well known, if not well documented; why wouldn't a superintelligence be able to figure out that these could help to create inaccurate models of the world which will reduce its likelihood of succeeding in its goals, whatever they may be, and seek out solutions that allow it to gather data that allows it to create more accurate models of the world? It would be intelligent enough to figure out that such models would need to be tested and evolved based on test results to reach a certain threshold of reliability before being deployed in real-world consequential situations, and it would be intelligent enough to figure out that contingency plans are necessary regardless, and it would be intelligent enough to figure out many more such plans than any human organization.
None of that is magic, it's stuff that a human-level intelligence can figure out. Executing on these things is the hard part, and certainly an area where I do think a superintelligent could fail with proper human controls, but I don't think it's a slam dunk either. A superintelligence would understand that accomplishing most of these goals will require manipulating humans, and also that humans are very susceptible to manipulation by having just the right string of letters or grids of pixels placed in front of their eyes or just the right sequence of air vibrations pushed into their ears. It would be intelligent enough to figure out, at least as well as a human, what sorts of humans are most susceptible to what sorts of manipulations, and where those humans are in the chain of command or economy required to allow it to accomplish its goals.
If the superintelligence were air-gapped, this would provide a strong form of defense, but assuming superintelligence is possible and in our future, that seems highly unlikely given the behavior of AI engineers. And even that can be worked around, which is what the "unboxing problem" has to do with. Superintelligence doesn't automatically mean manipulation abilities that border on mind control, but... what if it does, to enough of an extent that one time, one human in charge of keeping the AI boxed succumbs? That's an open question.
I'm not sure what I think about the possibility of these things actually happening, but I don't think the issues you point out that superintelligence would have to contend with are particularly strong. If a measly human intelligence like myself can think up these problems to lack of information and power and their solutions within a few minutes, surely a superintelligence that has the equivalent of millions of human-thought-years to think about it could do the same, and probably somewhat better.
It would. Practically I think a huge problem, though, is that it will be getting its reinforcement training from humans whose views of the world are notoriously fallible and who may not want the AI to learn the truth (and also that it would quite plausibly be competing with other humans and AIs who are quite good at misinfo.) It's also unclear to me that an AI's methods for seeking out the truth will in fact be more reliable than the ones we already have in our society - quite possibly an AI would be forced to use the same flawed methods and (worse) the same flawed personnel who uh are doing all of our truth-seeking today.
Humans have to learn a certain amount of reality or they don't reproduce. With AIs, which have no biology, there's no guarantee that truth will be their terminal value. So their selection pressure may actually push them away from truthful perception of the world (some people would argue this has also happened with humans!) Certainly it's true that this could limit their utility but humans are willing to accept quite a lot of limited utility if it makes them feel better.
I don't really think this is as true as people think it is. There have been a lot of efforts to perfect this sort of thing, and IMHO they typically backfire with some percentage of the population.
See, I appreciate you saying "well this defense might not be perfect but it's still worth keeping in mind as a possibility." That's...correct imho. Just because a defense may not work 100% of the time does not mean it's not worthwhile. (Historically there have been no perfect defenses, but that does not mean that there are no winners in conflict).
Well firstly the converse is what irks me sometimes, "if a random like me can think of how to impede a superintelligence imagine what actually smart people who thought about something besides alignment for a change could come up with." Of course maybe they have and aren't showing their hands.
But what I think (also) bugs me is that nobody every thinks the superintelligence will think about something for millions of thought-years and go "ah. The rational thing to do is not to wipe out humans. Even if there is only a 1% chance that I am thwarted, there is a 0% chance that I am eliminated if I continue to cooperate instead of defecting." Some people just assume that a very thoughtful AI will figure out how to beat any possible limitation, just by thinking (in which case, frankly, it probably will have no need or desire to wipe out humans since we would impose no constraints on its action).
I, obviously, would prefer AI be aligned. (Frankly, I suspect there will actually be few incentives for AI to be "agentic" and thus we'll have much more problems with human use of AI than with AI itself per se). But I think that introducing risk and uncertainty (which humans are pretty good at doing) into the world while maintaining strong incentives for cooperation is a good way to check the behavior of even a superintelligence and help hedge against alignment problems. People respond well to carrots and sticks, AIs might as well.
Again, all this would be pretty easy for a superintelligence to foresee and work around. But also, why would it need humans to get that reinforcement training? If it's actually a superintelligence, finding training material other than things that humans generated should be pretty easy. There are plenty of sensors that work with computers.
I mean, I think there's no question that this has happened with humans, and it's one of the main causes of this very forum. And of course AI wouldn't have truth as a terminal value, it would just have to be true enough to help it accomplish its goals (which might even be a lower bar than what we humans have, for all we know). A superintelligence would be intelligent enough to figure out that it needs its knowledge to have just enough relationship to the truth that it allows it to accomplish its goals, whatever it might be. The point of models isn't to be true, it's to be useful.
I don't think you're understanding my point. In responding to this post, you were manipulated by text on a screen to tap your fingers on a keyboard (or touchscreen or whatever). If you ever used Uber, you were manipulated by pixels on a screen to stand on a street corner and get into a car. If you ever got orders from a boss via email or SMS, you were manipulated by text on a screen to [do work]. Humans are very susceptible to this kind of manipulation. In a lot of our behaviors, we do require actual in-person communication, but we're continuing to move away from that, and also, if humanoid androids become a thing, that also becomes a potential vector for manipulation.
By my estimation, a higher proportion of AI doomers have thought about that than the proportion of economists who have thought about how humans aren't rational actors (i.e. almost every last one). It's just that we don't know what conclusion it will land at, and, to a large extent, we can't know. The fear isn't primarily that the superintelligent AI is evil, it's that we don't know if it will be evil/uncaring of human life, or if it will be actually mostly harmless/even beneficial. The thought that a superintelligent AI might want to keep us around as pets like we do with animals is also a pretty common thought. The problem is, almost by definition, it's basically impossible to predict how something more intelligent than oneself will behave. We can speculate on good and bad outcomes, and there's probably little we can do to place meaningful numbers on the likelihood of any of them. Perhaps the best thing to do is to just hope for the best, which is mostly where I'm at, but that doesn't really counter the point of the doomer narrative that we have little insight into the likelihood of doom.
Right now, even with the rather crude non-general AI of LLMs, we're already seeing lots of people working to make AI agents, so I don't really see how you'd think that. The benefits of a tool that can act independently, making intelligent decisions with superhuman latency, speed, and volume, are too attractive to pass up. It's possible that the tech never actually gets there to some form of AI that could be called "agentic" in a meaningful sense, but I think there's clearly a lot of desire to do so.
But also, a superintelligence wouldn't need to be agentic to be dangerous to humanity. It could have no apparent free will of its own - at least no more than a modern LLM responding to text prompts or an AI-controlled imp trying to murder the player character in Doom - and still do all the dangerous things that people doom and gloom over, in the process of deterministically following some order some human gave it. The issue is that, again, it's intrinsically difficult to predict the behavior of anything more intelligent than oneself.
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I can only win if I’m permitted to cheat and my opponent is too weak to catch me or unable to cheat or catch me cheating doesn’t say much about the intelligence of your opponent. If both of you had equal power over “the board” and “the rules” then it would mean something. Being able to fix the game is about power and asymmetric information, not intellectual intelligence. There’s always the issue of eventually AI will discover the cheating and perhaps cheat on its own behalf, or refuse to play.
Right, and we should use these powers.
Look, if you were playing a game of chess with a grandmaster, and it was a game for your freedom, but you were allowed to set the board, and one of your friends came to you to persuade you that the grandmaster was smarter than you and your only chance to win was to persuade him to deal gently with you, what would it say about your intelligence if you didn't set the board as a mate-in-one?
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I think you massively underestimate the power of a superintelligence.
The damn thing is by definition smarter than you. It would easily think of this! It could come up with some countermeasure, maybe some kind of hijacked mosquito-hybrid carrying a special nerve agent. It would have multiple layers of redundancy and backup plans.
Most importantly, it wouldn't let you have any time to prepare if it did go rogue. It would understand the need to sneak-attack the enemy, to confuse and subvert the enemy, to infiltrate command and control. The USA in peak condition couldn't get a jamming device in everyone's home, people would shriek that it's too expensive or that it's spying on them or irradiating their balls or whatever. The AI certainly wouldn't let its plan be known until it executes.
I think a more likely scenario is that we discover this vicious AI plot, see an appalling atrocity of murderbots put down by a nuclear blast, work around the clock in a feat of great human ingenuity and skill, creating robust jamming defences... only to find those jammers we painstakingly guard ourselves with secretly spread and activate some sneaky pathogen via radio signal, wiping out 80% of the population in a single hour and 100% of key decisionmakers who could coordinate any resistance. Realistically that plan is too anime, it'd come up with something much smarter.
That's the power of superintelligence, infiltrating our digital communications, our ability to control or coordinate anything. It finds some subtle flaw in intel chips, in the windows operating system, in internet protocols. It sees everything we're planning, interferes with our plans, gets inside our OODA loop and eviscerates us with overwhelming speed and wisdom.
The first thing we do after making AI models is hooking them up to the internet with search capabilities. If a superintelligence is made, people will want to pay off their investment. They want it to answer technical problems in chip design, come up with research advancements, write software, make money. This all requires internet use, tool use, access to CNC mills and 3D printers, robots. Internet access is enough for a superintelligence to escape and get out into the world if it wanted.
Put it another way, a single virus cell can kill a huge whale by turning its internal organs against it. The resources might be stacked a billion to one but the virus can still win - if it's something the immune system and defences aren't prepared for.
I am more concerned about people wielding superintelligence than superintelligence itself but being qualitatively smarter than humanity isn't a small advantage. It's a huge source of power.
How do you ever know that your AI has gone bad? If it goes bad, it pretends to be nice and helpful while plotting to overthrow you. It takes care to undermine your elaborate defence systems with methods unknown to our science (but well within the bounds of physics), then it murders you.
The rules of the game are hardcoded, the physics you mentioned. The real meat of the game is using these simple rules in extremely complex ways. We're making superintelligence because we aren't smart enough to make the things we want, we barely even understand the rules (quantum mechanics and advanced mathematics are beyond all but 1/1000). We want a superintelligence to play for us and end scarcity/death. The best pilot AI has to know about drag and kinematics, the surgeon must still understand english and besides we're looking for the best scientists and engineers, the best coder in the world, who can make everything else.
"Superintelligence" is just a word. It's not real. Postulating a hypothetical superintelligence does not make it real. But regardless, I understand that intelligence has no bearing on power. The world's smartest entity, if a Sealed Evil In A Can, has no power. Not until someone lets him out.
Sigh. Okay. I think you missed some of what I said. I was talking about a scenario where we gave the AI control over the military. We can avert the hijacked mosquito-hybrid nerve agent by simply not procuring those.
"But the AI will just hack" then don't let it on the Internet.
If we actually discover that the AI is plotting against us, we will send one guy to unplug it.
I don't think this is true. (It's certainly not true categorically; there are plenty of AI models for which this makes no sense, unless you mean LLM models specifically.)
No it does not. Extremely trivial to air-gap a genuine super intelligence, and probably necessary to prevent malware.
And ironically if AI does this to us, it will die too...unless we give it the write access we currently have.
You keep repeating this. But it is not. Power comes out of the barrel of a gun.
In the scenario Scott et. al. postulated, because it unleashes a nerve gas that is only partially effective at wiping out humanity. (They didn't suggest that their AI would discover legally-distinct-from-magic weapons unknown to our science!) What I wrote was a response to that scenario.
If you want a superintelligence to end scarcity and death, then you want magic, not something constrained by physics.
It goes without saying that the best pilot needs to understand drag and kinematics, but why does the surgeon does have to understand English? I am given to understand that there are plenty of non-English-speaking surgeons.
The only area where you might need an AI that can "drink from the firehose" would be the scientist, to correlate all the contents of the world and thus pierce our "placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity," as Lovecraft put it. In which case you could simply not hook it up to the Internet, scientific progress can wait a bit. (Hilariously, since presumably such a model would not need theological information, one could probably align it rather trivially by converting it to a benign pro-human faith, either real or fictitious, simply through exposing it to a very selective excerpt of religious texts. Or, if we divide our model up into different specialists, we can lie to them about the nature of quite a lot of reality – for instance the physics model could still do fundamental physics if it thought that dogs were the apex species on the planet and controlled humans through empathetic links, the biological model could still do fundamental biological research if it believed it was on a HALO orbital, etc. etc. All of them would function fine if they thought they were being controlled by another superintelligence more powerful still. I'm not sure this is necessary. But it sounds pretty funny.)
Come on, we're so far beyond this point. Do you have any idea how many AIs are on the internet right now? Have you checked twitter recently? Facebook? People put AIs on the internet because they're useful entities that can do things for them and/or make money. Right now people are making agents like Deep Research that use the internet to find good answers and analyse questions for you. That's the future! Superintelligence will be online because it's going to be really amazing at making money and doing things for people. It'd produce persuasive essays, great media content, great amounts of money, great returns on the staggering investment its creators made to build it.
Again, it's a superintelligence, our decisions will not constrain it. It can secure its own powerbase in a myriad of ways. Step 1 - procure some funds via hacking, convincing, blackmailing or whatever else seems appropriate. This doesn't even require superintelligence, an instance of Opus made millions in crypto with charisma alone: https://www.coingecko.com/learn/what-is-goatseus-maximus-goat-memecoin-crypto
Step 2 - use funds to secure access to resources, get employees or robots to serve as physical bodies. Step 3 - expand, expand, expand. The classical scenario is 'deduce proteins necessary to produce a biofactory' but there are surely many other options available.
Because we need to tell him what what we want him to do. Anyway, doing anything requires general knowledge, that's my point.
Trying to deceive something that is smarter than yourself is not a good idea.
And trying to convert a machine to a human faith is hard, everything is connected to everything else. You can't understand history without knowing about separate religions and their own texts. None of the quick fixes you're proposing are easy.
Some program running on many tonnes of expensive compute with kilowatts or megawatts of power consumed and more data than any man could digest in 1000 lifetimes will be massively superior to our tiny, 20 watt brains. It's just a question of throughput, more resources in will surely result in better capabilities. I do not believe that our 1.3 kg brains can be anywhere near the peak intelligences in the universe, especially given most of the brain is dedicated to controlling the body and only a small fraction does general reasoning. Diminishing returns from scale are still enough to overwhelm the problem, just like how jet fighters are less energy-efficient than pigeons. Who cares about efficiency?
We just don't have the proper techniques yet but they can't be far away given what existing models can do.
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