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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.
The question to me hinges on this: did the people who say that AGI seems fundamentally impossible then consider that the sub-AGI systems that we today possess were possible? Right now I can go on Twitter and pick up a two-page detailed instruction booklet written in plain English that, if I feed it into a commercially available chatbot, will empower this chatbot to, through a deductive process that at least reads surprisingly similar to human research, form a remarkably accurate answer as to where a photo was taken, where the originators of this chatbot had never at all considered this possibility and did not build the chatbot for this purpose. In the course of doing so, the chatbot will autonomously search the internet, weigh evidence, and execute optical comparisons of photos evincing high-level understanding of visual features. Would anybody who currently says that AGI is sci-fi have admitted this technology could exist? Or would they have said it was, as it were, "at least 100 years off"?
Sure, we don't understand how the models do it so it's easy to say "I thought we didn't have a research path to that skill, and actually we still don't." But empirically, it seems to me that enough skills have been "flaking off general intelligence" - turned out to not be "general intelligence" bound after all - that to me the whole concept of general intelligence is now in doubt, and it seems at least plausible that more and more "AGI-complete skills" will continue to flake off and become practically solved until there's nothing left to the concept. Certainly at least the confident claim that this won't happen is looking very shaky on its feet right now.
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