That depends on the dynamics, not on whether it is localized or distributed. E.g. if it includes a take-over of a large part of Internet, it will end up very distributed, so presumably a successful foom will get more distributed as it unfolds… But initially, a company will have it on its own local cluster, so it might be fairly localized for a while, depending on how they structure it...
(The monolithic abstractions, like a “singleton”, are very questionable. Even a single human is fruitfully decomposed into a “society of minds” following Minsky. It might look “monolithic” or a “singleton” from the outside, but it will have all kinds of non-trivial internal dynamics, internal discourse, internal disagreements, and so on; this rich internal structure might be somewhat observable from the outside, or might be hidden.)
The real uncertainty is time: what timeframe for an “intelligence explosition” people are ready to call “foom” vs slow takeoff? https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-takeoff makes a choice of putting this boundary between months and years:
A soft takeoff refers to an AGI that would self-improve over a period of years or decades.
A hard takeoff (or an AI going “FOOM” [2]) refers to AGI expansion in a matter of minutes, days, or months.
I certainly don’t think the scheme I described would work in minutes, I am less certain about days, and I am mostly thinking in terms of weeks (months do feel a bit too long to me, although who knows).
That depends on the dynamics, not on whether it is localized or distributed. E.g. if it includes a take-over of a large part of Internet, it will end up very distributed, so presumably a successful foom will get more distributed as it unfolds… But initially, a company will have it on its own local cluster, so it might be fairly localized for a while, depending on how they structure it...
(The monolithic abstractions, like a “singleton”, are very questionable. Even a single human is fruitfully decomposed into a “society of minds” following Minsky. It might look “monolithic” or a “singleton” from the outside, but it will have all kinds of non-trivial internal dynamics, internal discourse, internal disagreements, and so on; this rich internal structure might be somewhat observable from the outside, or might be hidden.)
The real uncertainty is time: what timeframe for an “intelligence explosition” people are ready to call “foom” vs slow takeoff? https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-takeoff makes a choice of putting this boundary between months and years:
I certainly don’t think the scheme I described would work in minutes, I am less certain about days, and I am mostly thinking in terms of weeks (months do feel a bit too long to me, although who knows).