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Notes -
On the plausibility of Mars Bases vs that of AI
Responding to @FeepingCreature from last week:
That was a continuation of this discussion in which I say of AI 2027:
As to Mars:
Most of what I know here comes from reading Zach Wiener-Smith (of SMBC)'s A City on Mars. It was wildly pessimistic. For a taste, see Gemini chapter summaries and an answer to:
"Given an enormous budget (10% of global GDP) and current tech, how realistic is a 1 year duration mars base? an indefinite one? what about with highly plausible 2035 tech?"
I agree with the basic take there, both as a summary of the book and as a reflection of my broader (but poorly researched) understanding/intuition of the area: Mars is not practical. We could probably do the 1 year base if we don't mind serious risk of killing the astronauts (which, politically, probably rules it out. Maybe Musk will offer it as a Voluntary Exit Program for soon-to-be-ex X SWEs?)
My main interesting/controversial (?) take: there is an important sense in which Mars bases are much less of baseless scifi nonsense than AI 2027.
Mars is a question of logistics: on the one hand, building a self-contained, O2 recycling, radiation hardened, etc, base requires tech we may (?) not quite have yet. On the other hand, it strikes me as closer to refinements of existing tech than to entirely new concepts. Note that "enormous budget" is doing a lot of work in here. I am not saying it is practical to expect we will pay to ship all of this to Mars, or risk the lives, just that there is good reason to believe we could.
AI is a question of fundamental possibility: by contrast, with AI, there is no good reason to think we can create AI sufficient to replace OpenAI-grade researchers with forseeable timelines/tech. Junior SWEs, maybe, but it's not even clear they're on average positive-value beyond the investment in their future (see my previous rant about firing one of ours).
I don't understand how anyone can in good faith believe that even with an arbitrary amount of effort and funding, AGI, let alone ASI, is coming in the next few years. Any projection out decades is almost definitionally in the realm of speculative science-fiction here. Even mundane tech can't be predicted decades out, and AI has higher ceilings/variance than most things.
And yet, I am sensitive to my use of the phrase "I don't understand." People often unwittingly use it intending to mean "I am sure I understand." For example: "I don't understand how $OTHER_PARTY can think $THING." This is intended to convey "$OTHER_PARTY thinks $THING because they are evil/nazis/stupid/brainwashed." But, the truth of their cognitive state is closer to the literal usage: they do not understand.
So, in largely the literal sense of the phrase: I do not understand the belief in and fear of AI progress I see around me, in people I largely respect on both politics and engineering.
I think that the main difference between a Mars base and AGI is that we have quite a good understanding of the physical constraints of a Mars base.
While SpaceX might have changed the economics of rockets by recycling them, the underlying physics and engineering constraints have been known since ca. 1950. We know what exhaust velocities we can reach, what the delta-v requirements for travelling to Mars are and so on. Absent black swans such as "someone invents a portal gun", we know that the way our constraints work out is very unfavorable, with rather small error bars.
For artificial intelligence, we very much have no underlying theory. We are Daedalus in a world where it turns out that you can craft wings from feathers and beewax which enable a human to fly. While some have been warning that we might get the Bad Ending if we soar to high, the truth in that analogy is that we have no comprehensive theory of heavier than air flight, aerodynamics, composition of the atmosphere and all that. In that world, asking if a man with wings can reach the moon is a question whose answer is purely an error bar, we just don't know. We notice the skulls of the Naysayers before us who had declared that feathers will not stop a man from falling, then that people can only glide downwards, then that sure, by flapping their wings a lot, they can gain a few meters, but surely not more than 50m, and are reasonably reluctant that to declare that the Moon is forever out of reach. On the other hand, in the real world, most straight lines can not be extrapolated indefinitely. So we just throw our hands up in the air and confess we don't know.
If you fly too close to the sun you'll be in for a bad day
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