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Comment by idlewords | Hacker News Reader

The place where AI alarmists seem to forget this most often is in computational complexity, and particularly in the power of super-hyper-computers to simulate reality. Bostrom in particular doesn't seem to appreciate the constraints complexity theory puts on what an AI could calculate (unless he thinks P=NP).

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Here's a response about why complexity theory may not constrain AI that much: https://www.gwern.net/Complexity%20vs%20AI

It is something "AI alarmists" think about.

What's his reason? I got halfway through that and realized I didn't understand.

That even if you see diminishing returns to what you can accomplish with greater intelligence, a small advantage will still compound into a large one over the theoretically infinite lifespan of an AI.

> the theoretically infinite lifespan of an AI

Infinite? Why isn't AI subject to the heat death of the universe?

It just might be smart enough to figure out a way around that.

Naturally , Asimov already wrote about this. _The Last Question_ and _The Last Answer_

Really,Asimov is more on point and more fun to read than all these Superintenlligence pundits

Ooh thanks for this. I've read THQ at least once before, but am really enjoying reading it again. I really liked this bit, emphasis mine as it relates to our current spectating of a dying ecosystem:

"Unhappily, Zee Prime began collecting interstellar hydrogen out of which to build a small star of his own. If the stars must someday die, at least some could yet be built."

He actually even wrote about the current debate. In his multiverse robots were actually banned from earth by bigots at some point.

I miss him I only started to read his book after his death. RIP Good doctor

s/theoretically/practically/, and I doubt it changes the conclusion that much (in practice).

I'll settle for "effectively." Deal?

Deal.

My point being, there's plenty of time before coming heat death starts to cause problems :).

The thing is it doesn't need a huge leap in any specific thing, it needs a quantum leap in anything at all. Complexity only constrains you from solving all problems of a given type in reasonable time, not from solving any instance.

There are even many things that we already suspect are just engineering challenges. Like rocketry, hacking and robotics. Even if an AI can just act like a million engineers and scientists working for a decade per second, without any higher level of thinking, it could do some incredible things.

Why would they be any more constrained than our biological brains?

Humans are able to calculate plenty with a relatively small amount of mass and energy.

I mean that for a lot of things, doubling our brainpower would would only extend our predictive horizon by a tiny amount.

There is a large class of problems for which you have fairly good solutions up front, but where even vast amounts of additional computing power don't help you do much better.

> I mean that for a lot of things, doubling our brainpower would would only extend our predictive horizon by a tiny amount.

Unless you come out with some algorithm that is sub-exponential for the important cases, and only gets slower for stuff you don't care about, or happen very rarely in practice.

People invent those algorithms all the time, for lots of kinds of problems.

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