I think the key disagreement I have admittedly with fast-takeoff views is I don’t find a pure-software singularity that likely, because eventually AIs will have to interface with the physical world like robotics to do a lot, or get humans to do stuff, and this is not too fast.
To be clear, I think this can be done if we take a time-scale of years, and is barely doable on the time-scales of months, but I think the physical interface is the rate-limiting step to takeoff, and a good argument that this either can be done as fast as software, a good argument that the physical interfaces not mattering at all for the AI use cases that transform the world, or good evidence that the physical interface bottleneck doesn’t exist or matter in practice would make me put significantly higher credence in fast-takeoff views.
Similarly, if it turns out that it’s as easy to create very-high quality robotics and the simulation software as it is to create actual software, this would shift my position significantly towards fast-takeoff views.
That said, I was being too harsh on totally ruling that one out, but I do find it reasonably low probability in my world models of how AI goes.
I think the key disagreement I have admittedly with fast-takeoff views is I don’t find a pure-software singularity that likely, because eventually AIs will have to interface with the physical world like robotics to do a lot, or get humans to do stuff, and this is not too fast.
To be clear, I think this can be done if we take a time-scale of years, and is barely doable on the time-scales of months, but I think the physical interface is the rate-limiting step to takeoff, and a good argument that this either can be done as fast as software, a good argument that the physical interfaces not mattering at all for the AI use cases that transform the world, or good evidence that the physical interface bottleneck doesn’t exist or matter in practice would make me put significantly higher credence in fast-takeoff views.
Similarly, if it turns out that it’s as easy to create very-high quality robotics and the simulation software as it is to create actual software, this would shift my position significantly towards fast-takeoff views.
That said, I was being too harsh on totally ruling that one out, but I do find it reasonably low probability in my world models of how AI goes.