The when is harder to know. If it’s possible then we need to figure out alignment first (which currently doesn’t look promising).
People are famously bad at predicting when right up until they have already done it.
“In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.
“In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.
“And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.”
When is easy; shortly after the X in succ(X, superIntelligentAGI).
How: keep adding more people and more technology and more connectivity to Earth. Simmer. This method has found superhuman strength (hydraulics), superhuman speed (wheeled vehicles), superhuman vision (telescopes/microscopes), superhuman calculating ability (calculators), superhuman memory (paper/computer storage), super-natural (in the literal sense) calorie sources (refined sugars and oils), and more. A human brain has an estimated 80 billion neurons, humanity is currently selling over a billion smartphones per year.
This may seem like a poor choice of method, but this method has been able to self-improve to develop precision machinery from nothing, control of electricity from nothing, large scale organization of groups of people from nothing, and more.
The when is harder to know. If it’s possible then we need to figure out alignment first (which currently doesn’t look promising).
People are famously bad at predicting when right up until they have already done it.
“In 1901, two years before helping build the first heavier-than-air flyer, Wilbur Wright told his brother that powered flight was fifty years away.
“In 1939, three years before he personally oversaw the first critical chain reaction in a pile of uranium bricks, Enrico Fermi voiced 90% confidence that it was impossible to use uranium to sustain a fission chain reaction. I believe Fermi also said a year after that, aka two years before the denouement, that if net power from fission was even possible (as he then granted some greater plausibility) then it would be fifty years off; but for this I neglected to keep the citation.
“And of course if you’re not the Wright Brothers or Enrico Fermi, you will be even more surprised. Most of the world learned that atomic weapons were now a thing when they woke up to the headlines about Hiroshima. There were esteemed intellectuals saying four years after the Wright Flyer that heavier-than-air flight was impossible, because knowledge propagated more slowly back then.”
https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/
>> The when is harder to know.
Next question:
How?
When is easy; shortly after the X in succ(X, superIntelligentAGI).
How: keep adding more people and more technology and more connectivity to Earth. Simmer. This method has found superhuman strength (hydraulics), superhuman speed (wheeled vehicles), superhuman vision (telescopes/microscopes), superhuman calculating ability (calculators), superhuman memory (paper/computer storage), super-natural (in the literal sense) calorie sources (refined sugars and oils), and more. A human brain has an estimated 80 billion neurons, humanity is currently selling over a billion smartphones per year.
This may seem like a poor choice of method, but this method has been able to self-improve to develop precision machinery from nothing, control of electricity from nothing, large scale organization of groups of people from nothing, and more.
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