Probably, when we reach an AI-induced point of no return, AI systems will still be “brittle” and “narrow” in the sense used in arguments against short timelines.
Argument: Consider AI Impacts’ excellent point that “human-level” is superhuman (bottom of this page)
The point of no return, if caused by AI, could come in a variety of ways that don’t involve human-level AI in this sense. See this post for more. The general idea is that being superhuman at some skills can compensate for being subhuman at others. We should expect the point of no return to be reached at a time when even the most powerful AIs have weak points, brittleness, narrowness, etc. -- that is, even they have various things that they totally fail at, compared to humans. (Note that the situation is symmetric; humans totally fail at various things compared to AIs even today)
I was inspired to make this argument by reading this blast from the past which argued that the singularity can’t be near because AI is still brittle/narrow. I expect arguments like this to continue being made up until (and beyond) the point of no return, because even if future AI systems are significantly less brittle/narrow than today’s, they will still be bad at various things (relative to humans), and so skeptics will still have materials with which to make arguments like this.
Probably, when we reach an AI-induced point of no return, AI systems will still be “brittle” and “narrow” in the sense used in arguments against short timelines.
Argument: Consider AI Impacts’ excellent point that “human-level” is superhuman (bottom of this page)
The point of no return, if caused by AI, could come in a variety of ways that don’t involve human-level AI in this sense. See this post for more. The general idea is that being superhuman at some skills can compensate for being subhuman at others. We should expect the point of no return to be reached at a time when even the most powerful AIs have weak points, brittleness, narrowness, etc. -- that is, even they have various things that they totally fail at, compared to humans. (Note that the situation is symmetric; humans totally fail at various things compared to AIs even today)
I was inspired to make this argument by reading this blast from the past which argued that the singularity can’t be near because AI is still brittle/narrow. I expect arguments like this to continue being made up until (and beyond) the point of no return, because even if future AI systems are significantly less brittle/narrow than today’s, they will still be bad at various things (relative to humans), and so skeptics will still have materials with which to make arguments like this.