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Comment by jvanderbot | Hacker News Reader

Well, in this case, we have the ability to invent chess (a game that will be popular for centuries), invent computers, and invent chess tournaments, and invent programs that can solve chess, and invent all the supporting agriculture, power, telco, silicon boards, etc that allow someone to run a program to beat a person at chess. Then we have bodies to accomplish everything on top of it. The "idea" isn't enough. We have to "do" it.

If you take a chess playing robot as the peak of the pyramid, there are probably millions of people and trillions of dollars toiling away to support it. Imagine all the power lines, sewage, HVAC systems, etc that humans crawl around in to keep working.

And really, are we "beaten" at chess, or are we now "unbeatable" at chess. If an alien warship came and said "we will destroy earth if you lose at chess", wouldn't we throw our algorithms at it? I say we're now unbeatable at chess.

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Again, are you claiming that it's impossible for a machine to invent anything that a human could? Right now a large chunk of humanity's top talent and capital are working on exactly this problem.

As for your second point, human cities also require a lot of infrastructure to keep running - I'm not sure what you're arguing here.

As for your third point - would a horse or chimpanzee feel that "we" were unbeatable in physical fights, because "we" now have guns?

Yeah, I think most animals have every right to fear us more now that we have guns. Just like Id fear a chimp more if he was carrying a machine gun.

My argument is that if we're looking for things AI can't to, building a home for itself is precisely one of those things, because they require so much infra. No amount of AI banding together is going to magically create a data center with all the required (physical) support. Maybe in scifi land where everything it needs can be done with internet connected drive by wire construction equipment, including utils, etc, but that's scifi still.

AI is precisely a tool in the way a chess bot is. It is a disembodied advisor to humans who have to connect the dots for it. No matter how much white collar skill it obtains, the current MO is that someone points it at a problem and says "solve" and these problems are well defined and have strong exit criteria.

That's way off from an apocalyptic self-important machine.

Sorry, my gun analogy was unclear. I meant that, just because some agents on a planet have an ability, doesn't mean that everyone on that planet benefits.

I agree that we probably won't see human extinction before robotics gets much better, and that robot factories will require lots of infrastructure. But I claim that robotics + automated infrastructure will eventually get good enough that they don't need humans in the loop. In the meantime, humans can still become mostly disempowered in the same way that e.g. North Koreans citizens are.

Again I agree that this all might be a ways away, but I'm trying to reason about what the stable equilibria of the future are, not about what current capabilities are.

I think we've converged on a partial agreement, but I wanted to clarify the gun analogy part.

I would also be afraid of chipmunks if I knew that 1/100 or even 1/1000 could explode me with their mind powers or something. I think AI is not like that, but the analogy is that if some can do something better, then when required, we can leverage those chosen few for a task. This connects back to the alien chess tournament as "Humans are now much harder to beat at chess because they can find a slave champion named COMPUTER who can guarantee at least a draw".

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