Despite all the negativity in replies, I try to remain optimistic that this investment in AGI-related research is going to be a net positive.
Congrats to the team, and break a leg!
Congrats to the team, and break a leg!
If I were a billionaire, that's exclusively where I'd be putting my money, selfishly.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Octopus_(yacht)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Institute
https://www.cs.washington.edu/building
In fact this tradition of rich people founding universities and research is nothing new. Stanford University was founded by a couple who said "The children of California shall be our children" after their child died. Andrew Carnegie founded the Carnegie Technical Schools, and John Harvard donated money and his library to a college founded two years earlier.
[1] https://www.philanthropy.com/article/Paul-Allen-s-2-Billion-...
While not research, those things can have profound impacts on people. Several years ago a Star Wars exhibit came to the Indiana State Museum here in Indianapolis, they had an entire section dedicated to both the prosthetic devices in the film and in real life, one of the video segments playing next to some props from the film and real prosthetic devices was a clip of one of the inventors of the real technology talking about how watching the film version directly led to him pursuing his career and working directly on various prosthetic devices trying to make it a reality.
These sorts of experiences could have profound impact on the creative process for one or more individuals that might have far more profound effects for society than active research.
Billionaires buy cars and boats because they're stores of value. For instance, a Mclaren from the 90s is worth more today than when it was sold.
This shows that in the 12 months to the end of June the value of classic cars as a whole was up by 28%, which compared with a rise of 12% for the FTSE-100 index of leading shares and a 23% slump in the price of gold.
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2013/sep/07/luxury-inve...
HN had more positive comments regarding that announcement.
[1]: https://papers.nips.cc/paper/5346-sequence-to-sequence-learn... [2]: https://github.com/applecrazy/reportik/
Personally, I think it is only a matter of time. Though I suspect that we will probably 'cheat' our way there first with the wetware from cultured neurons that various groups are developing, before we manage to create it in completely synthetic hardware. Also, it might just be the wetware that leads us to the required insights. This is very problematic territory however. I think we are very likely to utterly torture some of the conscious entities created along this path.
The first main issue is that of compute capacity. Human brain has equivalent of at least 30 TFLOPS of computing power and this estimate is very likely 2 orders of magnitudes off.
Assume that somehow simulating 1 synapse takes only 1 transistor (gross underestimate). To simulate number of synapses in a single human brain then would need same number of transistors as in 10,000 NVidia V100 GPUs, one of the largest mass produced silicon chip!
The second main issue is of training neurons that are far more complex than our simple arithmetic adders. Back prop doesn't work for such complex neurons.
The 3rd big problem is that of training data. Human child churns through roughly 10 years of training data before reaching puberty. The man-made machine perhaps can take advantage of vast data already available but still there needs to be some structured training regiment.
So current AI efforts in relative comparison of human brain are playing with toy hardware and toy algorithms. It should be surprising that we have gone so far regardless.
I don't think an AI would help the Left/Right divide in this way because certain news outlets would still have the same incentives to manipulate what people desire in a more extreme directions.