Thursday, September 20, 2007

Strong AI Takeoff Scenarios...

Things that could cause the current Moore's Law curve to be greatly exceeded:
  1. Enormous nanotechnology advances.
  2. Enormous biotech advances, allowing dramatic intelligence augmentation to human brains.
Things that could cause a sudden, large (1000x) increase in hardware devoted to AI self-improvement:
  1. Self-improving AI, nowhere near *general* human-level intelligence yet, is suddenly put in charge of a botnet and swallows most of the Internet.
  2. Awareness of the promise or the threat of Strong AI becomes widespread. A government, or government consortium, launches an Apollo Project-scale activity to create a Strong AI, hopefully under controlled conditions!
Other Strong AI Takeoff scenarios:
  1. The usual "recursive self-improvement" scenario
  2. We were too conservative. Turns out creating a Strong AI on a mouse-level brain is easier than we thought; we just never had a mouse-level brain to experiment with before.

1 comment:

Michael Vassar said...

Some lesser ways of breaking Moore's Law for AGI purposes include enormous manufacturing advances that aren't necessarily nanotech in character but which radically increase manufacturing capabilities, enormous advances in microchip design software reducing generation times and enabling custom chips for most applications, enormous advances in finance enabling an individual to control a significant fraction of global resources and devote them to AGI.