I think you’re making a great case for optimism. Based on your last line, I don’t think our positions are too far apart.
Laser brooms on the ground are a heavier infrastructure investment than just the rocket, and they haven’t been built yet. Rockets with no brooms are cheaper and easier. So needing the broom raises the threshold, perhaps the raised threshold is still in reach, but at some theoretical point, it will not be.
The fossil fuel comment was more in the direction of ‘if we insist on burning everything currently in the ground, the runaway greenhouse effect is lethal to the species at 500-1000 year timelines’.
I assert that we could screw ourselves permanently, in this century, by digging into a hole (through inadequate investment of non renewable resources like helium or failure to solve engineering challenges) which we cannot exit before we wreck our habitat (plenty of non co2 scenarios for this). I’m not sure how much pessimism is warranted, I certainly don’t think that failure is inevitable, but I absolutely do think it’s on the table.
Well the fossil fuel scenario has the issue that as the earth gets hotter it would be more and more expensive and obviously a bad idea to extract and burn more fossil fuels. Moreover more and more of the earth would be uninhabitable and also difficult to drill or mine for hydrocarbons.
The other scenarios, we are very close I think far closer that most realize to self replicating machinery. All tasks involved to manufacture machinery are vulnerable to already demonstrated machine learn algorithms it is just a matter of scale and iterative improvement. (By self replicating I mean robots made of parts in robots now with gears and motors and circuit boards and wiring bundles. And all tasks involved to manufacture the parts and assemble them are done by other such robots. This is likely possible with a few hierarchial general agents similar to the recent deepmind paper, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play
By hierarchial I mean use an agent made of several subagents trained with a state of the art method like this or better, and each subagents is specialized. Iike a perception agent then a planning agent.
Self replicating machinery would trivially blow past any of these traps and make them moot. The problems we would have are ones we might not have thought of.
I think you’re making a great case for optimism. Based on your last line, I don’t think our positions are too far apart.
Laser brooms on the ground are a heavier infrastructure investment than just the rocket, and they haven’t been built yet. Rockets with no brooms are cheaper and easier. So needing the broom raises the threshold, perhaps the raised threshold is still in reach, but at some theoretical point, it will not be.
The fossil fuel comment was more in the direction of ‘if we insist on burning everything currently in the ground, the runaway greenhouse effect is lethal to the species at 500-1000 year timelines’.
I assert that we could screw ourselves permanently, in this century, by digging into a hole (through inadequate investment of non renewable resources like helium or failure to solve engineering challenges) which we cannot exit before we wreck our habitat (plenty of non co2 scenarios for this). I’m not sure how much pessimism is warranted, I certainly don’t think that failure is inevitable, but I absolutely do think it’s on the table.
Well the fossil fuel scenario has the issue that as the earth gets hotter it would be more and more expensive and obviously a bad idea to extract and burn more fossil fuels. Moreover more and more of the earth would be uninhabitable and also difficult to drill or mine for hydrocarbons.
The other scenarios, we are very close I think far closer that most realize to self replicating machinery. All tasks involved to manufacture machinery are vulnerable to already demonstrated machine learn algorithms it is just a matter of scale and iterative improvement. (By self replicating I mean robots made of parts in robots now with gears and motors and circuit boards and wiring bundles. And all tasks involved to manufacture the parts and assemble them are done by other such robots. This is likely possible with a few hierarchial general agents similar to the recent deepmind paper, https://deepmind.com/blog/article/generally-capable-agents-emerge-from-open-ended-play
By hierarchial I mean use an agent made of several subagents trained with a state of the art method like this or better, and each subagents is specialized. Iike a perception agent then a planning agent.
Self replicating machinery would trivially blow past any of these traps and make them moot. The problems we would have are ones we might not have thought of.