“But AIs have practically human-level intelligence right now!”
“This time it’s different!”
“But computers have evolved in the last 20 years!”
“AI will revolutionize every aspect of life!”
(Some of the arguments used 40 years ago about the impending tech singularity that’s definitely coming in like 1986… 1987 tops.)
If you think like longer than two seconds about it, the belief that faster computers with more storage capacity somehow inevitably combust into intelligence and sentience is completely absurd; starting with the fact that modern human-level intelligence in life first took 4 billion years of evolution and then another million years or two of human culture to develop.
@thomasfuchs it won't just happen. It's taking decades if hard work from tens of thousands of very smart people.
It'll happen like any human accomplishment, in small steps, but general AI is pretty much an inevitability
@Rjdlandscapes No, it’s not. A lot of tech fails, even with massive budgets, decades of work and the brightest minds behind it.
We don’t have fusion power, we don’t have large quantum computers, we don’t have a cure for cancer, we don’t have ubiquitous human space flight, we still have starvation, we still have communicable diseases—these are all things techno-utopists 60 years ago would have assured you we’d have by the turn of the century or not much later.
we don't have those things.. yet.
Fusion power and quantum computers will come sooner or later. 20 years? 50? No idea.
Medicine is really hard to predict. But I have high hopes for many kinds of cancer. Communicable diseases are so many and so diverse the only panacea here is to live in a bubble.
Starvation is a political issue nowadays.
Ubiquitous human space flight, in the Jetsons sense, has always been a nonsense, even speaking theoretically. We don't even have a theory of how to do that without being outrageously expensive. We weren't able to make the Concorde commercially viable, for God's sake. And living in a Mars or a space station, no matter how much money you throw at it, would be even worse than living in Antarctica. How many people would really want to do that?
