You’re assuming that someone, given a zillion dollars, could implement your plan, but if you don’t even know where to begin implementing it yourself, what reason do you have to believe someone else would?
Put another way, if “I can’t imagine we can’t [X] given the technology of 2015” works when X is “evolve artificial intelligence”, why wouldn’t it work for any other X you care to imagine?
You’re assuming that someone, given a zillion dollars, could implement your plan, but if you don’t even know where to begin implementing it yourself, what reason do you have to believe someone else would?
For example, because Eitan Zohar is not an expert of that.
I don’t know where I would start if I had to send a manned spaceship to Mars, but that doesn’t mean I expect nobody to know.
I don’t know where I would start if I had to send a manned spaceship to Mars, but that doesn’t mean I expect nobody to know.
Where does your confidence that somebody (or some distributed group of people) knows how to send a manned spacecraft to Mars come from? It’s not like anyone’s ever exhibited this knowledge before.
Something must make you think “hey, sending people to Mars is possible”. The important question as far as I am concerned is whether that’s a good-something or a bad-something. In the case of “evolving artificial intelligence with a computer the size of a dump truck must be possible”, I think it’s a bad-something.
People are working on going to Mars. AFAIK, the main barrier is the cost.
Back to the original question, I can imagine where to start with evolving intelligence, but I’d need much more than a petabyte. (although, actually flops are more important than bytes here, I think)
I think the relevance is that no presently living human being knows how to program an AI, whether with an evolutionary algorithm or in any other way, no matter how powerful the hardware they may have.
The AI problem is a software problem, and no one has yet solved it.
If you, personally, were given a zillion dollars and told to implement this plan yourself, how would you do it?
No idea. What relevance does that have?
You’re assuming that someone, given a zillion dollars, could implement your plan, but if you don’t even know where to begin implementing it yourself, what reason do you have to believe someone else would?
Put another way, if “I can’t imagine we can’t [X] given the technology of 2015” works when X is “evolve artificial intelligence”, why wouldn’t it work for any other X you care to imagine?
For example, because Eitan Zohar is not an expert of that.
I don’t know where I would start if I had to send a manned spaceship to Mars, but that doesn’t mean I expect nobody to know.
Where does your confidence that somebody (or some distributed group of people) knows how to send a manned spacecraft to Mars come from? It’s not like anyone’s ever exhibited this knowledge before.
Something must make you think “hey, sending people to Mars is possible”. The important question as far as I am concerned is whether that’s a good-something or a bad-something. In the case of “evolving artificial intelligence with a computer the size of a dump truck must be possible”, I think it’s a bad-something.
People are working on going to Mars. AFAIK, the main barrier is the cost.
Back to the original question, I can imagine where to start with evolving intelligence, but I’d need much more than a petabyte. (although, actually flops are more important than bytes here, I think)
I think the relevance is that no presently living human being knows how to program an AI, whether with an evolutionary algorithm or in any other way, no matter how powerful the hardware they may have.
The AI problem is a software problem, and no one has yet solved it.