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My simplified argument, as distilled from Lesswrong (i.e. Yud) and other books.
The ceiling of capabilities for what we call 'intelligence' is extraordinarily high. Computation can be done many orders of magnitude more efficiently than you think, in the extreme case.
The floor for something 'superintelligent' (right now, I'm using the definition 'smarter than humanity itself as a collective') is substantially below that.
Human brain architecture is NOT anywhere near the most efficient way to instantiate intelligence. (This follows naturally if you accept 1.)
Humans are capable enough to build electronic hardware that can outperform their own brains in computation efficiency.
Thus, eventually, humanity might stumble into or intentionally build a coherent entity that is superintelligent, and sooner than we 'expect.'
Focus in on 4, too. What specific task do you think human brains can perform that we're MAXIMALLY efficient at, such that no electronic version can beat us?
The conceit is that there is no such task, and so its only a matter of time, and adding capabilities to existing models, until the human capabilities are exceeded on all fronts. If the resulting entity is able to do self-improvement, it by definition will do so faster and more efficiently than humanity can track.
I remain unconvinced about (1): it reads as plausible, but I don't think the existence of "superintelligence" is obvious. It seems just as likely that if intelligence is, say, predictive ability, then it could be bounded by the scale of input data with diminishing returns. As an idea, we can train a human to a decent fraction of what cutting-edge models do without needing anything near the scope of training material that the Big Kids are crunching, and with under a hundred watts for 20 years or so.
But first we'd need to iron out what intelligence is, which seems murky still beyond "I'll know it when I see it" a la the Turing test. Is it essentially connected to consciousness (what is that, too)?
I think 'intelligence' if defined in 'practical' terms is "the efficiency with which one can absorb and process the information in an environment, then utilize (or at least theorize how) the material in the local environment to achieve particular goals."
The more complex the goals one can achieve, and the more efficiently they can achieve them, the higher the intelligence.
The Von Neumann/Manhattan Project parallel I'm drawing makes this point. Given all the materials necessary to make a nuclear weapon, how quickly can a particular group of humans go from merely theorizing about the possibility to actually getting one built.
A group of humans that includes Von Neumann and other Physics PhDs, with the backing of the U.S. military, can get it done in, say, 5 years.
A similarly sized group of humans of utterly average intelligence (as measured by IQ)... probably never. Even WITH the backing of the U.S. military.
One Von Neumann and a bunch of average IQ humans... well I don't know.
A whole bunch of Von Neumans working together...
I don't think that's a terrible definition, but it still ends up bounded by the amount of information in the environment available to feed into your intelligence. A third eye would give humans "more information", but probably wouldn't improve our intelligence substantially. I'm sure there are some perfectly capable blind physicists out there.
The other question is what a bunch of Von Neumann clones could do today. IIRC the idea of an atomic bomb was at least known before the Manhattan Project started. It's hard to know in foresight what sort of advances could be made in the next five years, and which will prove intractable. It'd be awesome to solve fusion power, but it's taken well more than five years so far. I'm not sure that the geography of "the possible future" is well enough known to make great claims about what could be there: not all advances that can be seen are inherently terrible.
I expect a LOT. Assuming they could cooperate, which I think they would. This guy literally founded Game Theory among other things.
Like, the other path to superintelligence might be to clone like 10 Von Neumanns, raise them according to best practices, and get them interested in the idea of creating Friendly AI, then give them a lab with a trillion dollars in funding.
Yes yes, lets bound it to "useful," "nonredundant" information. Still, a superintelligence should be able to make use of almost all information it receives second-to-second to make accurate predictions about its future so as to better use resources for its goals.
See, lemme zero in on this for emphasis. Yes, it is indeed hard.
But the higher 'intelligence' entities, given accurate information (ensuring the information you collect is true is another aspect of intelligence!), should ALWAYS be better at making such predictions than lower intelligence ones.
High IQ humans were at least discussing Artificial Intelligence and putting forth timelines for its appearance. And I suspect realized what was happening when AlphaGo beat Sedol. If I were maybe 10 points smarter, I would have plowed money into NVDIA then and there, or at least as soon as people realized AI could run on GPUs.
Average IQ humans might now get that AI has arrived and can figure out uses for it, but would NEVER have seen it coming 5 years out, even if you showed them a complete factual article explaining the AlphaGo Sedol situation. How do I know? I TRIED VERY HARD to explain the implications back when it happened. I also tried to explain the implications when DallE first arrived on the scene. Now these folks I tried explaining to use image generators without a thought!
Low IQ humans, presumably, STILL don't really get what AI is or what it does.
This is why making falsifiable predictions and tracking their outcomes is kind of critical for smart folks to stay calibrated.
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I don't think there's strong evidence against these but I don't think there's strong evidence for these either. Certainly LLMs are not more efficient than the human brain.
Could be. But this isn't an argument for short timelines, which is implicitly what we're discussing here.
Only if, with self-improvement, it actually improves things that aren't suitable for RL environments with massive amounts of data. So far we are very much in the "lumpy capabilities" regime.
At some tasks they undoubtedly are.
The thought experiment that makes it palatable to me is this:
John Von Neumann might be the smartest human who has ever lived. At least that we have good records of. So call him peak human cognitive capacity.
That man, by coordinating with other extremely smart but not quite as smart humans, fully revolutionized multiple fields, and he died relatively early so we don't even know what he might have output over the rest of his life.
We should, in principle, be able to build a simulated Von Neumann that is ~as smart as he was.
Then we should be able to copy that cognitive model.
We should be able to run a bunch of these copies in parallel and have them work together.
With enough hardware... we should be able to speed up these copies arbitrarily.
We could ask these copies (if they don't ask it themselves) how to improve their own speed and efficiency.
With Von Neumann and Co. we were able to move from pure theory to actual nuclear weapons in <10 years. with 10,000 Von Neumanns running at, say, double speed, what could they do in 5 years?
(Yes, I'm handwaving technical details).
In that respect, I consider Von Neumann's existence as evidence of superintelligence being possible. Unless there's something completely ineffable about human cognition that we, as humans, can't ever capture it.
This is basically assuming the conclusion though. Even granting this for the sake of argument, it doesn't mean that we'll be able to build such a simulation in the next 10 years rather than in ten thousand.
My counter is that you're implicitly making a special pleading for how human brains work that is unlikely to be true.
I assume creating a Von Neumann-level intelligence is possible because a Von Neumann level intelligence existed. It has been created, so it could be done again. And repeated.
I'm not saying we clone Von Neumann, scan his brain and build an electronic copy of it. I'm saying even if we can only build a computer program that is approximately as smart as the smartest human ever... the mere fact that we can then copy that program and run it in parallel should result in technological improvement on par with the Manhattan project.
There is NO limiting principle I'm aware of that makes it impossible to build an electronic brain that meets those criteria. Even if we stumble into it rather than intentionally build it, eventually our millions of monkeys slamming away at keyboards can stumble into a viable method.
Evolution was able to stumble into building Von Neumann, after all.
So what I'd ask you, as a full counter to my arguments, what upper limit or barrier is going to appear BEFORE we get to the point we've built something smarter than our whole species?
You are still assuming the conclusion. We have not built a computer program that is as capable as even a sub-median human in all domains, as far as I can tell, unless there is a program that can tie a shoelace and correctly tell me if I should drive to the car wash.
I don't mean this as a gotcha. LLMs are prone to certain cognitive biases that humans are not, and vice versa, and they are highly useful in many fields. But it's clear that the capabilities frontier is not uniform, far from it.
I don't know. All I know is that the current paradigm relies on massive amounts of artificially generated example problems with answers and I don't believe that all of human knowledge is amenable to such treatment. So far I have not seen any reason to believe that actually general, rather than spiky, superintelligence is imminent. And the imminence is, again, really the key question that's motivating all this.
I guess its easy for me to believe that if a largely randomized optimization process (natural selection) was able to eventually get to Von Neumann intelligence, then humans working with a bit more inherent purpose towards the goal of building a Von Neumann level intelligence can probably get there, even if they make some mis-steps and wander around in the dark for a bit.
Especially if we can build some optimization processes that result in sub-Von Neumann intelligences that are nonetheless useful.
Like, the mountain peak we're seeking is visible, poking out above the fog, even if we can't see and specifically plan a route that will get us there, we have flashlights and climbing gear and GPS systems in place to make navigation through the terrain towards the peak much easier. We're not utterly lost with no clue on what we're doing, in that respect.
I don't think this is true. You can imagine it, but you can't see it. If we understood how human intelligence worked it'd be a different story, but we don't.
I can look at what highly intelligent humans have achieved, based on the records of such people, and we can know that there is some path to creating intelligence of that level.
I do have to 'imagine' what it would be like to interact with Von Neumann, but the actual output he produced is tangible and verifiable.
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