Comment by runarberg
5 days ago
> Are you confident that will be the case in 5-10 years?
Yes, I am. I am very confident that general purpose digital computers will never be more efficient then human minds in generating moderately complex code.
Why am I so confident... Well, it has been over 10 years since AlphaGo beat top go player Lee Sedol. AlphaGo was able to beat the a world class go player by doing several thousands orders of magnitude more computations then Lee Sedol, and it did so by spending several orders of magnitude more energy then the top human go player. Today, over 10 years later, the top go machines are able to beat world class go players much easier, but still do so using the exact same strategy of outcomputing the humans with thousands of orders of magnitude more computations, and spending orders of magnitudes more energy.
Things did not change in the past 10 years, I see no reason why it should change 10 years from now.
>Things did not change in the past 10 years, I see no reason why it should change 10 years from now.
Has it not? Why do you say that?
Also, do we still require a Deep Blue sized supercomputer for chess? :)
What has not change is the strategy of throwing a gargantious amount of computations at the problem. If anything we throw more computations at more problems now than in 2016 (and in 1997 for that matter). The underlying technology is pretty much the same, just more parameters, more calculations, etc. Yes every individual calculations takes less power now then in 2016, but we make up for that by making millions of millions of more calculations, even for simpler tasks.
Sure, but there will be an upper bound after which we will be close to human level performance on the vast majority of tasks, and then at that point the focus becomes efficiency (or a continuing road to superintelligence for some tasks).
But regardless, compute will get to a point where human level intelligence close to as efficient as we are. You could argue it already is today, when you factor in the resources that the average person in the west already uses in terms of their overall impact on the planet.
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