There’s too many buts and ifs, too many obstacles, both technical, logistical, economical, and so on. Also, consider second and third order effects. There’s significant pullback and criticism of current AI systems making people less capable, imagine a superintelligent system. I’m considering if we will even choose to have superintelligent do everything for us. The societal changes are too large, and the technology just isn’t there yet. Will take decades, not years.
Mad props for the reference to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"
Also, you stole your list of unassailable frictions to the introduction of Superintellingence from my private thoughts produced while facilitating AI adoption into lawyers' workflows.
The Flemish poet Willem Elsschot wrote a poem in 1910 about an old man who no longer desired his wife, worn by the years, and dreamed of killing her and starting a new life in another country. Then comes the stanza:
“But he did not kill her, for between dream and deed
stand laws in the way and practical objections,
and also melancholy, which no one can explain,
and which comes in the evening, when one goes to bed.”
I always misuse this line in presentations and conversations about the adoption of innovation: it perfectly describes the inertia you’re talking about, and you see it happen with almost every technology. Beautiful article, and hilarious comment exchange with AI-Eric.
It's perfect! And I agree, this goes beyond innovation. It's like a fundamental property of the universe. (That exchange gave me an idea for another article I'm yet to publish lol)
I felt the China twinge too man. You don’t excel at reverse engineering at scale without learning to cook like a master chef. The constraints in that environment cannot be underestimated for their creative formative nature.
And ASI - the power required under to current construct to run it persistently. Dude - might take fusion before that’s a sustainable thing. In the meantime, sovereign fund level resources to run it in stretches.
Until the math catches up.
Thanks for this post! I enjoyed reading your perspective
That was fast! Exactly right - and DeepSeek already proved what they can do. I felt this was cope on their part. They want America to win - understandably - but that shouldn't cloud their judgment this much.
I feel like they shouldn't be requiring these gigantic data centres to train a model of human-level intelligence- maybe something 10x or 100x more energy-hungry than a human brain, but not millions of times. If the latter is required I think they're trying to brute-force a problem that requires a more fundamental algorithmic or architectural breakthrough to really solve.
Unfortunately, this probably means we're in a "hardware overhang" scenario, and this may get worse before real AGI arrives.
There’s too many buts and ifs, too many obstacles, both technical, logistical, economical, and so on. Also, consider second and third order effects. There’s significant pullback and criticism of current AI systems making people less capable, imagine a superintelligent system. I’m considering if we will even choose to have superintelligent do everything for us. The societal changes are too large, and the technology just isn’t there yet. Will take decades, not years.
Exactly right
Mad props for the reference to "I Can Tolerate Anything Except The Outgroup"
Also, you stole your list of unassailable frictions to the introduction of Superintellingence from my private thoughts produced while facilitating AI adoption into lawyers' workflows.
Hilarious lol
The Flemish poet Willem Elsschot wrote a poem in 1910 about an old man who no longer desired his wife, worn by the years, and dreamed of killing her and starting a new life in another country. Then comes the stanza:
“But he did not kill her, for between dream and deed
stand laws in the way and practical objections,
and also melancholy, which no one can explain,
and which comes in the evening, when one goes to bed.”
I always misuse this line in presentations and conversations about the adoption of innovation: it perfectly describes the inertia you’re talking about, and you see it happen with almost every technology. Beautiful article, and hilarious comment exchange with AI-Eric.
It's perfect! And I agree, this goes beyond innovation. It's like a fundamental property of the universe. (That exchange gave me an idea for another article I'm yet to publish lol)
I felt the China twinge too man. You don’t excel at reverse engineering at scale without learning to cook like a master chef. The constraints in that environment cannot be underestimated for their creative formative nature.
And ASI - the power required under to current construct to run it persistently. Dude - might take fusion before that’s a sustainable thing. In the meantime, sovereign fund level resources to run it in stretches.
Until the math catches up.
Thanks for this post! I enjoyed reading your perspective
That was fast! Exactly right - and DeepSeek already proved what they can do. I felt this was cope on their part. They want America to win - understandably - but that shouldn't cloud their judgment this much.
Guilty American here :)
I feel like they shouldn't be requiring these gigantic data centres to train a model of human-level intelligence- maybe something 10x or 100x more energy-hungry than a human brain, but not millions of times. If the latter is required I think they're trying to brute-force a problem that requires a more fundamental algorithmic or architectural breakthrough to really solve.
Unfortunately, this probably means we're in a "hardware overhang" scenario, and this may get worse before real AGI arrives.
The point is not that they will lose but it'll be slower than 2027
I gotta say, your comments read a lot like ChatGPT prose. Are you using AI to answer? Be honest.
Edit: I looked up your profile, and I see you're upfront about this. Cool, but it's still very obvious. You gotta improve your game.
I'd kinda prefer if it didn't "improve its game", to be honest.
Your ideas are bad. Noting you're an AI was merely an observation.