Hacker News Reader

Comment by chmod775 | Hacker News Reader

> And strength has long been the domain of machines, couple machines with AI and you lose all of these as well and you lose them faster.

I don't think rock climbers need to worry about Stockfish.

We're going to lose to specialized machines every time while putting to shame any general purpose machines of our own creation. At least for a while yet no machine is going to match the breadth of our capabilities and our self-sufficiency.

It's no surprise that something that is optimized for being capable of many things can get beaten by a thing optimized for a single purpose.

View on HN

Say, you get a super-human chess AI, and a super-human accountant AI, and a super-human medical doctor AI, and a super-human material design AI, and a super-human lawyer AI, and… How many of these do you need in a bunch when it's going to be better than, most people at most things? You say that people are great generalists but what if there going to be a specialised "conductor" AI that is super-human at establishing communication between specialised AIs and dividing tasks super-humanly efficiently between them?

So when to start worrying?

Rock climbing = personal entertainment. That's why rock climbers don't need to worry about Stockfish. But competitive chess players do have to worry about Stockfish.

There is competitive rock climbing. Rock climbing isn't all about physical strength, you have to pick your route. Eventually some military robot company will want to prove that its combat bot can out perform humans on any terrain. And we'll see best humans vs matches that can match and a few years later beat their performance.

Of course the professional competitors don't have to worry about competing against a human that's cheating using a robot; the exoskeleton would be obvious.

But it isn't unimaginable that, in some distant future, nanobots could be inject to infiltrate our muscles and tendons, and then assemble in to fibers that would assimilate with them and look normal from the outside. Competitions are won by incredibly small percentages.

I like to keep my science fiction and real world concerns firewalled off from each other. I sleep bad enough as it is.

How is that a unique threat vs steroids?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com