Comment by huijzer
1 day ago
> No, programming and math is basically what AI research is.
Most importantly, in these fields results can be easily verified which means that if you have enough compute, that you can generate correct training data. OpenAI had an early story - which could be a lie of course - about how they tried to train a robot but the actuators would be toast before the robot would have learned. Math and programming doesn't have such problems.
There is a hierarchy. Do robots need software or does software need robots?
There are lots of fields with easily verifiable outputs but that doesn’t make them valuable targets.
Eventually you’re going to need robotics to kick off the singularity, sure, but I would start with programming and math (and compute) which is exactly what they are doing.
Let’s say you start with robots, like we did, but we lack compute, we lack dev tools, we lack the ability to generate vast training environments, we cannot automate mathematical research of any kind in any way shape or form not even trivially, in general we are bottlenecked by math, code and compute. “Doing robotics” first without tackling the others is taking an astronomical detour which we as humanity are fond of.
I find the notion we automate cognition itself first and then tackle the secondary problems quite rational.