Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016)
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Fun fact, there is no historical evidence of an adult human ever dying from a cheetah attack. They are naturally shy, and a lot smaller than you may realize.
When Dario and others say things like "this is happening and we should probably figure out what to do about it" what ends up happening is people hear "this is happening," see that the person warning them is the person doing the thing, and then short-circuit. "Why can't you just stop then?"
Dario's point, and the point of the people actually trying to solve the problem, is that AI is not just Anthropic and OpenAI. It's the knowledge that you can put more compute in, and get more capability out.
It is a technology now. It exists, in the world. Wishing will not make it go away. Being angry at it will not make it go away. Lying about how much water it uses will not make it go away. If Anthropic and OpenAI Shut down tomorrow, Accenture will not say "oh guess that llm thing won't work, let's go back to hiring humans!"
It is a truth that you can multiply matrices and get something that is economically useful. We cannot un-know this.
Physics allows it, so it will happen. So we should probably figure out what the heck to do about it. If your answer is something along the lines of "restrict it" then 1. let me know how that goes when other people don't, and 2. I really would rather prefer a world where we have the machines do the work the machines can do, not a world where we have human makework. If this means we need to figure out redistribution, let's talk about redistribution!
The only reason that infrastructure buildout is happening at all is the ideological capture of a small handful of obscenely wealthy people, who are fueling this buildout by spreading the extreme paranoia you’re echoing here.
I do not understand why no one else can see the circularity of this reasoning. There is nothing inevitable about tying up all of this productive capital in the pursuit of AI. There are many, many other projects requiring similar capital and human effort, with much more obvious payoffs, such as decarbonizing the world’s energy systems.
“It’s physically possible to provide abundant electricity without burning fossil fuels” is more provably true than any of the insane science fiction bullshit that undergirds the AI buildout, and yet, the entire clean energy industry is still having to build insane financial Rube Goldberg contraptions to make incremental progress.
“Inevitability” is a lie, period. This entire thing is extremely historically contingent, and we could easily stop this train tomorrow.
So, the Baruch Plan?
The Manhattan Project was $~2B in 1945 dollars, and a national-scale industrial mobilization. Now North Korea has the bomb. That's with nuclear material, which doesn't get easier and easier and easier to work with every year.
Compare to the price to train GPT-2 in 2019 ($43,000), and in 2026 ($73) [0].
The point being: the price to train frontier models isn't coming down, nor is it going to come down because for models to remain on the frontier they have to keep getting bigger and bigger (and trained on more and more data).
In the US capitalist context, it's certainly inevitable, because AI is the biggest and most attractive source of profit and power out there right now. In that context, the broad strokes of what's happening currently, including the financial bubble, are predictable and inevitable.
What are the concrete steps which would allow us to "easily stop this train"? And why haven't we used steps like that to stop other cases where obscenely wealthy people have screwed everyone else over to increase their wealth? Is public control of the means of production involved, perhaps? If so, your definition of "easily" and mine are incompatible.
- Labor organizing
I grew up in a union household, and my dad and my grandfather fighting for better wages, healthcare and working conditions are the reason why I got a good education and work in Silicon Valley surrounded by Stanford assholes.
All of us who work for a paycheck can get together and say, “no, we will not allow you to record keystrokes and mouse movements to train our replacements. No, we will not have our performance or future employment based on an AI leaderboard.”
Previous generations fought and died for our right to do that, but in 2026 we just sit on our hands and complain on this forum. We can and should do better.
The U.S. is absolutely on fire right now with opposition to data centers. We, collectively, can extract concessions or ban their construction altogether.
These things aren’t “easy”. They are also eminently possible.
The reality is that the US has been a story of increasing concentration of wealth and power. The people who "fought and died" bought some important (from a human rights perspective) but ultimately minor (from a capitalist perspective) concessions from the capital class. The battle you describe is one of defense of rights, not of gaining control.
The overall system of capitalist control remains unaffected, and it's why the buildout of AI is, in fact, inevitable under the current system.
You're essentially saying no, you want public control of the means of production instead. That might be great, if even a sizable fraction of the US population agreed with you. But due in no small part to decades of propaganda, they don't.
Ok, good luck
I still believe Dario asks these questions in good faith. Nobody believes that about e.g. Sam Altman or Elon Musk. They compared themselves to Oppenheimer because it helped them get attention. When it started an actual regulatory conversation, they were suddenly less worried.
Maybe it would run afoul of antitrust regulations, but it's totally realistic for all those competitors to get together and say "hey, we could really fuck up society in our race to get rich with this tech, lets all slow down." And if these companies are run my mature people who don't subordinate every consideration to greed, they'd to it.
1. Some people have no ethical problems making bombs.
2. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs so do something else.
3. Some people have an ethical problem with making bombs, but say "well someone else will make it if I don't" so they make bombs.
I think it is reasonable to argue against #3 as a reasonable position.
It only takes one of them to do it and they are not sharing information. If the 1 you remove from N is the one that will discover it, then it will dramatically affect when AGI happens. If it is not, then it will have zero effect.
The latter is far more likely if N>2
Cheetahs are very fast, but humans have way more endurance.
Try not to read the Wikipedia as it might spoil the short story, there’s the pdf available on the web somewhere
Because otherwise, 'it' will just back out of your trap and go along to continue to follow, wouldn't it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> The Man versus Horse Marathon is an annual race over 21 miles (34 km), where runners compete against riders on horseback through a mix of road, trail and mountainous terrain. The race, which is a shorter distance than an official marathon road race, takes place in the Welsh town of Llanwrtyd Wells every June.
> ...
> The event started in 1980, when local landlord Gordon Green overheard a discussion between two men in his pub, the Neuadd Arms. One man suggested that over a significant distance across country, man was equal to any horse. Green decided that the challenge should be tested in full public view, and organised the first event.
While the horses had a string of wins from 2008 to 2019, 2022 to 2025 had three wins for humans and one win for a horse.
The next race event: https://www.green-events.co.uk/man-v-horse
I don't think the Mongol cavalry would lose races to humans over any distance of steppe
https://www.outsideonline.com/health/training-performance/hu...
> Lobb’s victory came on a hot day, as did Florian Holzinger’s subsequent victory in 2007—a significant detail, according to a new study in the journal Experimental Physiology from Lewis Halsey of the University of Roehampton in Britain and Caleb Bryce of the Botswana Predator Conservation Trust. Halsey and Bryce gathered historical data from three endurance races that pit humans against horses, including the Man Versus Horse Marathon, to test the idea that humans are uniquely adapted to run for long distances in hot weather.
> This idea has been around since the 1980s, and it gained prominence when Harvard anthropologist Daniel Lieberman and University of Utah biologist Dennis Bramble published a 2004 Nature paper hypothesizing that running had “substantially shaped human evolution.” They argued that our ability to keep running at a moderate pace even on hot days allowed us to run prey like kudu to exhaustion or outcompete other animals in the race to scavenge carcasses left by other large predators.
There's a plot with the analysis of the Old Dominion with weather stations in there that show a steeper negative slope for horses compared to the humans.
> Overall, for every increase of 1 degree Celsius (1.8 degrees Fahrenheit), the horses slowed down by about 1 percent—or 0.07 miles per hour, to be precise. The humans, on the other hand, slowed down by just 0.04 miles per hour for each extra degree of heat. That 36 percent advantage for the humans was statistically significant.
---
For the Man vs Horse, the weather conditions ("Hot", "Rain/sun/windy" - not exact values)... the entry for 2022 was the human winning by 1:51 on a warm day, and 2023 was a human wining by 9:44 on a sweltering day.
There are horse endurance races where the winner arrived in 7,5 hours after 160km[1]. That's a sub 2-hours marathon almost 4 times in a row (not to mention with a guy on your back).
[1] https://eatnstays.com/uaes-almazrouei-wins-almutadil-cup-at-...
https://www.enduranceonline.it/live/cat/V.php?gara_id=1911&v...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon
> ... There are other Man versus Horse races — in Scotland based at Dores, near Loch Ness, in Central North Island, New Zealand and in the U.S. city of Prescott, Arizona.
And the Arizona race page: https://managainsthorse.com
[1] There’s a well known viral video of a wildlife park keeper who sleeps with three cheetahs who behave pretty much like large house cats.
You're right. They're smaller than you probably imagine (about the weight of an average Labrador). That's still definitely big enough to be a problem if they felt threatened, I'm sure, but the animals my friend was in charge of were raised to be around people for outreach purposes. That particular cheetah, for example, had once been on the Today show.
It is tempting for anyone raised in the West, and immersed in Judeo-Christian culture. And for anyone, in general, as it offers an epic narration of a personal entity.
Yet, the reality might be messier - IMHO closer to biology than to a weird mixture of computer science and theology. There is no ultimate intelligence (see Karpathy’s starfish shapes), just a collection of adaptability, learning, generalization and self-reference. Also, even an extremely smart being (or process) can be fragile.
So, less God, more WAU from SOMA or the Ocean from Solaris.
The issue is simple. Just like us (who are arguably complex, look at what we're building over here, this AI computer stuff!), entities have simple core needs (like food, water, power, etc.).
An infinitely smart AGI has the potential, nay, likely cause, to require infinite resources. We're already seeing the effect in the computing sector on e.g. chips, there's no reason to think this trend won't continue...
Lets circle back to the hydrogen argument, will we blow ourselves up. Real concern, abated by hard numbers. Different atmosphere, different concentrations, different pressure, different possible outcomes.
Today, we don't have those numbers. We don't have those calculations. I don't disagree with the point at the end "about how people can exploit other people, or through carelessness introduce immoral behavior into automated systems". These are issues, too. But saying there are other issues, don't worry about this big issue over here, is the absolute worse argument possible.
That's hand waving.
How would it make the combinatorial explosion in state space search go away, to pick one example?
And if it doesn't, is it then an infinitely smart AGI?
The concept seems to assume all problems humans struggle with can be solved. The halting problem is one witness that this is probably not true.
It doesn't need to be infinitely smart to do a better job than the worst of humanity's blunders.
Put another way, you do not deny a proof by inference because it "leads to large numbers".
We don't need to speculate, we can see many, many examples today of more and less intelligent species, and also what happens to the less intelligent ones, even taking humans out of the equation.
I'd argue, even a machine intelligence that merely managed to be mildly smarter than us would be a threat. AGI merely has the potential to be infinitely smarter than us, but that's somewhat irrelevant given we might not even be smart enough to realize how much smarter they are (a cat will likely not appreciate the difference in intelligence between a dog, an elephant, or a dolphin, despite all those animals being generally smarter).
As for simple needs, humans also have complex ones around social interactions and the need for mental stimulation.
They are more characterized by how they grow and when they stop than by their "physical reality". Proof of this is in that different infinities exist - characterized precisely by how fast they grow, i.e., one "infinity" is "larger" than the other.
My point is, getting hung up on "infinity" as being unrealistic is not the point. It is the tool with which to understand how thing behave. The same as any calculus problem - you take the limit to the infinity to understand how the function behaves.
That effect is underwritten by economic demand and moderated by economic costs. There are more reasons to expect the trend to asymptote than somehow turn into an infinite process.
I mean, all stories about religious dedication to "alignment", with doomsday vision if we do it wrong, and a vision of paradise if we do it correctly.
In particular, the concept of the Roko's Basilisk is some rehash of the Pascal's Wager.
Oh boy couldn't agree more. The whole Basilisk drama really caused me to rethink the idea that a group of Rationalists were in practice, were in fact particularly rational. CF The Atheists vs someone that happens to be atheist. To their credit, they also acknowledged this somewhat and hence the CFAR crowd.
The word "rehash" also resonates. Like Google has a tendency to use PHD's to reinvent everything over and make up new words and terms for the same concepts.
Having spent a little too much time in the early 2010's at Bay Area LW meetups, the more fantastical LARP of fanfic, and religious mythology often felt a bit at odds. There was the aspect of a charismatic, autodidact leader obsessed with a certain J.K. Rowling IP and the kinky stuff..Don't get me wrong, I still have fond memories of this time overall :)
From my perspective, a core issue seemed to be no-one seemed to particularly motivated in defining what it meant to be rational, aside from some loose segmentation around instrumental vs epistemic rationality. (ie practice vs theory). And because of this it almost had a faith vibe to the scene. Like "trust me bro" this is "super high brow nerd stuff" and on your third helping of "The Sequences" all these formulas and shiny new words will all make sense what and it will be clear why we’re doing these meetups. (It totally wasn't anything to do with mental masturbation and high-iq crowd bonding and feeling good ;)
When I was into Christian apologetics (C.S. Lewis etc) as in my first year of CS & philosophy of science in college, there was a similar thing.. after a year of seeking out the scientific, and logical explanations for all the religious dogma I was indoctrinated into growing up. In the end, it pretty much reduced to "just have faith". This was after exhausting the "well you're not an expert on Christian theology, so you cant have a solid argument around the nature and existence of God because you need to study more" counter. This despite reading and studying the Bible at length.
For example, right now. Is it rational to be typing this up on HN, when I have other more important goals to do? OTOH reminiscing on the past and connecting with a single serving online friend OP, gives a bit of a dopamine hit. And maybe sharing resonates with others and increases happiness in the world? (or not if anyone still LW reads this and maybe feels a different type of way)
So that’s community right and good (in the sense it's aligning with goals)? But then its driven by emotions, so that kinda is not supposed to be rational. Is it rational to observe one's own mental states and take action? Turtles all the way down!
I should also note that the paperclip maximizer is not something the LW crowd believes should exist. Its primary function as an idea is to illustrate the orthogonality thesis: that goals and intelligence aren't dependent on each other. Its secondary function is to illustrate instrumental convergence.
Conversely I think it's a bad definition, it's a show of what is the frame of the mind of the person who states that: "I want to show my control by destroying my things, look how powerful I am" which sounds like a toddler. That's how you portray psychopathic/narcissistic disorders in movies.
If you so readily dismiss Herbert's definition of control posit a competitor and we can pressure test it. Also, "correlated with a toddler's world view" is not the epic rhetorical refute you think it is.
I think you missed the point. It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power. What things can or can't you cause to happen? And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
> It's absolutely nothing to do with what's good to do, only brute facts of power.
This sentence reads like: "if we narrow our view this much, this makes sense". I agree that it makes sense under the condition that we narrow the view of issue. It's valid in this small context (a film about controlling one thing).
> And indeed, toddlers and psychopaths have a scarily good understanding of what power is.
I disagree completely with this sentence. They are good at controlling in certain situations. They don't understand it. If you want to understand it, there is a lot of information about controlling, whole fields of knowledge that people spend many years on studying. As for psychopaths, they are very predictable and controllable when you understand control theory and how psychopaths operate. There are courses on this single topic by people who need to do it to prevent tragedies (police negotiators) and they are not that complicated.
Not for fridges, I think that was a bad example. But it seems accurate at the level of geopolitics, where e.g. Iran shows it controls Hormuz by closing it with mines and other weaponry.
It presumes a sentient, rational counterparty. Being able to shoot a horse isn't the same as being able to ride it.
It's a political concept. It requires agency from the actor recognising the threat. We're pretty close to being able to hurl a giant rock at Mars. That doesn't by a long shot mean we "control" it.
If there were a human settlement on it, on the other hand, being able to credibly threaten Armageddon does give the thrower control.
In the original context of Dune Paul controls the spice because he can destroy it and his will would survive but it would destroy the way of life of the other cultures. So saying "Paul controls spice" only makes sense because another entity needs it and what's really meant is "Paul controls society".
Alternative definition of control: You do some actions and it changes state. It's used by a field called "control theory". A lot of people agreed on this definition. Destroying something is "end of control, because there is no more things to control". You can control something UNTIL you destroy it. That's why I think "you control what you can destroy" is invalid, because it captures only one small aspect of controlling things, and also the least usable one.
If I live in a world where I can afford a freezer with food in it, it's practically guaranteed I can destroy my fridge without starving to death after. Heck, even if I was completely broke I could destroy my fridge and would have a pretty good (+99.999%) chance of not dying in the next year from starvation.
I get I'm nitpicking your point a bit, but I actually think most of our machines we could destroy and still be fine. We'd need to make sacrifices to our quality of life of course..
We need better scifi! And like so many things, we already have the technology.
This is Stanislaw Lem, the great Polish scifi author. English-language scifi is terrible, but in the Eastern bloc we have the goods, and we need to make sure it's exported properly.
It's already been translated well into English, it just needs to be better distributed.
What sets authors like Lem and the Strugatsky brothers above their Western counterparts is that these are people who grew up in difficult circumstances, experienced the war, and then lived in a totalitarian society where they had to express their ideas obliquely through writing.
They have an actual understanding of human experience and the limits of Utopian thinking that is nearly absent from the west.
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34257025 - Jan 2023 (1 comment)
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People (2016) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18499973 - Nov 2018 (248 comments)
Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13240811 - Dec 2016 (580 comments)
Maciej Ceglowski – Superintelligence: The Idea That Eats Smart People - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13120213 - Dec 2016 (4 comments)
Interesting to trace these 10yr old AI posts from then to the present moment. The other one with a similar vintage would be “Should AI Be Open” [2] from Dec 2015, which is fascinating to juxtapose against the recent public battles.
[0] “BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding“: https://arxiv.org/abs/1810.04805
[1] “Improving Language Understanding by Generative Pre-Training”: https://cdn.openai.com/research-covers/language-unsupervised...
[2] “Should AI Be Open?” | Slate Star Codex: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/12/17/should-ai-be-open/
None of that was predicted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12168228
I even wrote up a whole article that specifically called RL loop based development as the future:
https://medium.com/@andrewkemendo/the-ai-revolution-will-be-...
> Reinforcement Learning tasks rely on ridiculous amounts of data. Whereas with traditional software architecture, where you accomplish tasks through explicit task instruction, RL trains for tasks based on millions of tests through a reward system. Most importantly once you have trained it to some minimum level, if you deploy it correctly, then it should continue improving — so long as you bake feedback into the UX. Imagine that instead of telling excel what to do, you and every other user will have a conversation with excel, improving the system incrementally.
First is to become as free as possible from lock in and own your own data. The best way to do this is the self host your own technology.
This is really not possible for the majority of people though.
So practically I always suggest that you have multiple providers for services, don’t pool your data any one place (other than your own place) and own your backups. This is basic stuff that we’ve been teaching since the 90s and still very applicable today.
The harder and more impactful thing is to then create community owned technology that is outside of the commerce model.
So for example imagine that instead of FAANG running the world, the largest tech and data orgs would look more like wikimedia foundation, Annas archive, scihub, Graphene, Linux etc…. and more generally that technology and governance are open and not bound to commerce/taxation/coercion based organizations.
Ultimately we need to create a democratic-technology movement such that capitalists don’t monopolize technology, which is currently the trend. This is not some kind of simple thing by the way, this is revolutionary economics is what I’m talking about.
My suggestion is to read Post-Scarcity Anarchism by Murray Bookchin
VI is close to what we have now, software that has some fixed intelligence, it can only really imitate what it has been taught and is not very adaptable. Useful for kiosks, drones, essentially just a tool rather than something we would see as a separate being.
I think the main point still stands. (And there have been some pretty prescient depictions, e.g. Marvin the paranoid android was a pretty spot-on prediction of Bing. Or perhaps the fact that Marvin was in the training set was what led to Bing?)
You can even get a literal tiger into a carrier, even though it can kill you easily. You just drug its food and wait till it passes out. This is because you are smarter than it, and know that tranquilizers exist and how to obtain them, which is a strategy that cats of any size are not even able to conceive of, and probably can't understand what happened after it's been done to them.
Who was Hitler to most people ? Just a persuasive powerful voice on the radio, or words on a paper. So not even two way communication and yet he inspired armies that killed millions. Hawkings wouldn't even need to pay anyone. There would be plenty of people willing to get the cat in the box for Stephen Hawkings.
Human zoo keepers are actually smarter than that. For months, they train the tiger to go into the carrier to get food. Then on transport day, they shut the door behind it. Unclear if this works for future transport situations.
We are awash in self-replicating machines. The biosphere is already a grey-goo apocalypse. Any new competitors have a serious moat to cross to out compete any existing self-replicators.
We are awash in intelligent agents. Our society (and meta society) is full of superhuman agents already. There is a huge moat for any new intelligence paradigm to cross.
What I am afraid of is the existing superhuman agents (companies, governments and religons) will produce AGI or superintelligence and then proceed to use it as cognitive mitocondria, even further deepening thier supremacy in the cognitive ecosystem.
I was like... nanotechnology and grey goo already exist. It's called biology. The scenarios I was reading were silly. They violated conservation laws and laws of physics. But people were believing it and calling for limits on nanotechnology research.
I remember arguing with smart people on this, and that was when I started to realize that there's two kinds of dumb. I had the same realization later when I argued with an incredibly intelligent guy who was absolutely convinced the moon landings didn't happen. See, there's dumb-dumb and smart-dumb, and the people who thought grey goo would eat Earth or that the Apollo landings were a hoax were the latter. Smart-dumb is high-IQ rationalization of ultimately irrational and absurd ideas, and the smarter you are the more effectively you can do this.
I've met some really shockingly brilliant fools over the years who believe in all kinds of outlandish conspiracy theories, absolute literalist religious fundamentalism, idiotic political doctrines that directly contradict basic logic and all of lived human history, and so on. All of them can engage in sophisticated airtight rationalizations.
I sometimes wonder if this is one of the evolutionary forces constraining intelligence. In my experience, smarter people are somewhat more likely to believe highly sophisticated and complex stupid things, and they are much better at convincing others of these things. That's probably more dangerous to them, their family and friends, and the species than dumb people believing simple silly things that are easily debunked.
On AI...
Is AI potentially dangerous? Very. It's already dangerous in a number of ways. The biggest right now is probably mass production of personalized propaganda, mass surveillance, and mass manipulation. There's also the potential that bad actors could use it to accelerate their ability to make things like garage WMDs (biotech, chemical weapons, etc.). None of this requires hard take-off superintelligence. It's just inherent risks to a powerful technology.
These are not entirely new risks. They were already present in the Internet and computing. AI just raises them to a higher level.
The extreme hard take-off stuff is silly, and it actually distracts us from talking about the much more realistic dangers and coming up with reasonable solutions that don't also throw away the huge benefits of these technologies.
One of the differences between MIT and other schools is that MIT has paid staff to promote in the media anything their faculty does. A book by professors at most universities has zero promotion and most of the time will go nowhere.
Our current AI is more like a fancy Google search than some kind of machine God.
How do we get to ASI? That's what recursive self-improvement is about.
If AGI is reachable, then we can make AI that, in turn, makes improved successor AIs. The performance goes up. It's not bounded by human intelligence - it's bounded by how much the previous generation of AI could improve upon itself.
We don't have a stable recipe for RSI yet, but AI development is already AI-assisted. It's just that the "improvement" loops of today are long, and require plenty of human input. Betting against RSI is betting that it'll stay that way forever - that tightening the loop and removing humans from it is fundamentally impossible.
How is this better than training the next Google by having the bots do Google searches?
I'm not saying that it is impossible to surpass human intelligence, all I'm saying is the AI has the same set of working data that humanity does. Unless Plato was right all along it's going to be hard for the AI to discover too much more from that data than humanity has already discovered. Sure there are some less well explored niches that the AI can help fill in, but the part where it makes the next step above humanity seems unlikely given the constraints.
Do we expect the AIs to develop entirely new branches of mathematics? To discover new physical phenomena? Come up with an entirely new way of thinking? That seems to be what these AI companies are promising and I'm skeptical.
Humans and AIs play the same chess, on the same board, under the same rules. Doesn't stop modern AIs from crushing humans at it. In a narrow closed domain, vastly superhuman capability isn't just attainable - it's expected.
There are issues with going to less narrow, more open domains with it. But evolution producing increasingly advanced intelligence is a bit of an existence proof for broad open domain RSI being possible - there is a serious argument that human intelligence has evolved in a "self-play" pressure cooker, via semi-adversarial optimization against other humans. If a continuous improvement path like this exists in non-intelligent space, intelligent design has "copy that" at its floor.
We already know that AIs can come up with Move 37, or use branches of human mathematics against each other in novel ways, or come up with human-unnatural solutions like LLMs solving ARC-AGI-3 puzzles with A* pathfinding and a constraint solver instead of humanlike spatial reasoning. Matter of whether this can be pushed further. And by "whether", I mean "whether it happens in the next few decades", not "whether it's possible".
David Silver who worked on AlphaGo has recently raised money to try similar approaches with general intelligence. (https://www.cnbc.com/2026/04/27/deepmind-ineffable-intellige...)
Human intelligence doesn't scale upwards well. Individual humans only get this smart, and there are gains from getting multiple humans to work together - but the more of them you add, the larger is your communication and coordination overhead. In no small part because humans are self-interested agents that simply aren't designed to compose their capabilities seamlessly. You can't get a vastly superhuman intelligence simply by piling together more humans.
Human intelligence doesn't scale sideways well either. Unskilled labor is cheap and plentiful, but if you have a human with a very specific skill, the process of getting more of that capability is very long and very involved. Often, it's easier to redesign an entire process to run on worse humans than it is to train more humans for better performance.
Institutions are more capable than individuals, but far less capable than the sum of individuals within them. At many corporations, the majority of individual productivity is absorbed by management overhead and corporate rot.
AI isn't bounded by those limitations.
AI can scale intensively and extensively. AI can be scaled up by upping the compute budgets. AI can be replicated and copied indefinitely. AI doesn't have the innate human "I don't live to work, I work to live" overhead. AI can outclass human intelligence by a long shot.
The "moat" that's there is already being eroded by modern day LLMs. Betting that future AI systems can't cross it is folly.
What proves that AI doesn't have the same limitations? There's only so much computation you can do in given space, and all communication is limited by universal speed limit.
Which doesn't bode well for the future of human intelligence. Computing hardware gets better at what it does generation to generation, but no one is about to release Human Brain 2.0 any time soon. Human mind is not a fast-moving target.
Principal-agent problem isn't a physical law. It's a limitation that AIs don't have to suffer from. Humans have to delegate to other humans - but for AI, "principal" and "agent" might just be the same exact system instanced twice.
These are claims about future AI, not actual facts. Part of the counter argument is the world will already be awash in AIs institutions and individuals make use of. An ASI would arise in a world that is already full of formidable intelligences that provide a check on what it can do. This is what happened with the evolution of replicators/life. No species was able to fully dominate the biosphere because there are too many other capable replicators, and there are always tradeoffs in capabilities.
We imagine the possibility of an unrestrained god-like ASI ruling the solar system. But it's just that, an imagination backed by the assumption that self-recursive improvement leads there. Problem is, the real world never turns out to be that simple.
It's probably the case that alien ASI replicators aren't devouring the universe either because of various restraints.
The bottleneck for a developing AI is experience. Yes we need compute, but we need data to compute on.
We have bypassed that limit by starting with literally every scrap of human generated prose that ever existed. I expect an explosion of expansion when visual and world models hit critical mass to properly leverage new experiences. But even then, engaging with reality is the bottleneck.
I can build you a very efficient scalable online map-reduce-like that runs inference on new corpus. We already made that. It took hardware getting large enough to fit the corpus in memory, instead of "scaling" it with networks for it to be viable. The latency of the network passing around partial solutions was WAY too high.
Computers don't scale forever. They are made of hot metals. The limits are heat, material, and the speed of light, but those are very real limits, that don't offer more than a constant multiplier of advantage over meat.
AIs might get smarter than us, arguably, like many other meat and paper based super-human intelligences around us, they already are. But it doesn't scale forever. It will hit limits, fairly quickly, of compute and experience to integrate into it's overfit model.
And, so far, the results of "visual data for improving general intelligence" runs were nothing but disappointments.
I think vision is just a piss poor modality to learn intelligence from? Very low value, per bit and per token both. You only ever want to tap it if you need your AI to operate based on visual data at deployment time. Otherwise, even "experience" is best gathered in text RLVR rollouts.
The secret of human sample efficiency isn't that visual data is somehow better for learning intelligence. It just isn't. Human "training data" is a hundred kinds of awful - humans are just good at scavenging it for all its worth. Evolution has tuned that very well.
Which means: AIs can get good at it too. It's not a wall - it's a skill issue.
So in order to scale, AI doesn't need compute. It needs "engagement with reality and agency". Which is STILL might do better than us, but is happening in the real world, with real competition over resources. As long as we don't do something dumb like enthusiastically give it control over our major economic actors. I don't think we need to worry.
On the "intellectual immune system" side, I would argue that language's limitations are themselves fitness. We are already in danger of memetic hijacking. All those points you make about multiple instances of an AI cooperating, don't take malice and memetic attacks into account. It goes back to "why I am not afraid of grey goo". I trust yeast to find a way to metabolize basically everything. We have memetic attacks too.
I like imagining similar discourse when a more basic tool was invented: "A hammer is like a genie, it's all powerful, but, when you hit something with it, it interprets that super-literally, and it hits it."
In fact, if we consider the strongest version of the safety argument for AI, namely one in which the danger is not coming from robots but rather from a disembodied AI controlling our global finances and/or infrastructure, the assumption still does not correspond to reality.
AI is easier than people 10 years ago thought it would be. It's also easier to align than people feared it would be. It's the humans using the AI that are hard to control.
If and when the feedback loop on self improvement becomes more efficient and the window on training significantly narrows then things getting out of control rather quickly seems likely. Especially that it's likely we'll have a metric fuckton of compute by that point.
>Such skull-and-dagger behavior by the tech elite is going to provoke a backlash by non-technical people who don't like to be manipulated. You can't tug on the levers of power indefinitely before it starts to annoy other people in your democratic society.
How right the author was.
1. It's hard to put a cat in a box despite us being smarter than a cat, so we're safe. (Counter: we're pretty good at putting cats in boxes when it matters.)
2. It was hard for Australia to kill Emus, so we're safe. (Counter: Australia could probably kill all Emus if it mattered enough, and we definitely accidentally kill off species when one of their inputs for life matters enough to us.)
3. Some smart humans get paralyzed by hedonism or existential angst instead of optimizing for arbitrary goals implied by their arbitrary value sets, so we're safe. (Counter: others overthrow the Czar, land rockets, etc.)
4. Modern AI is data-trained, so recursive improvement requires more data, so we're safe. (Counter: AI-crafted, synthetic data is a thing.)
5. We don't (yet) know how to improve our brains with brain surgery, so we're safe. (Counter: same as #4 above, which unlike us/evolution AI is being deliberately trained to understand and perform.)
6. Children take a long time to grow up, so we're safe. (Counter: the author's own "Premise 5: Computer-Like Time Scales", where they correctly note that computers can be arbitrarily faster than us.)
7. Individual smart humans on a desert island would be cooked, so we're safe. (Counter: nothing says the capability of a single AI must stop at that of an individual human, or that of a small group of smart humans; humans brains got dropped into a savannah and eventually they launch rockets.)
8. If AI doom is not a real threat, believing in it makes you believe some other not-real things that seem crazy or distasteful. (Counter: do we have a clear argument why it is not a real threat yet, in the list above?)
2. At what cost? Much like the climate change above, you'll have people on the AI side even when it's out in the field extincting us.
4. Adding, over time synthetic data and its generating algorithms can become unaligned with human needs/behaviors (an example would be our current stock market, numbers must go up!).
8. Going back to climate change, it was predicted a long time ago, and while the explosion of automobiles has greatly improved human lives the risks of climate change could erase a lot of that. Might have been better if we dealt with the problem before we have to give the thermometer worried looks.
2026: hold my molt beer
(I love how "connect an ai to the internet" is always the precursor to doom in pre-2022 scifi scenarios, and then as soon as we get something we call ai we hit that big red button)
This is the premise I rejected immediately and, if you agree with me, it takes down the whole house of cards. Let me explain. The rationale has nothing to do with "quantum shenanigans."
I have been called religious but will readily concede that of course a physical brain is possible without a soul. What is impossible is to replicate a soul with purely physical matter. Therefore we may understand that "superintelligence" is possible, and maybe inevitable on the long thread of time, but - crucially - it will never be able to approach that supernatural element present in us (the spark of the godhead) and therefore never be able to replace humanity.
In that sense it is like any other natural disaster that threatens to make us extinct, but it is not some "superhuman" nor anything close.
What do you mean by 'supernatural' - and (assuming your definition is the standard one of 'not detectable by any measurement') by what mechanism that could possibly affect physical matter? (the onus is on you to prove the positive claim that there exists the supernatural or soul to begin with, which there is currently no evidence for).
The concept is self defeating by its own definition, either it is physical in some capacity (and therefore can be measured and replicated through yet unknown means) or it is not (and therefore indistinguishable from not being there at all).
Feeling that there 'must be' a soul is not enough to prove that it exists.
The feeling of experience is not enough to prove that experience is in anyway supernatural.
> What is impossible is to replicate a soul with purely physical matter.
What? Why? Where is the proof of this?
First and foremost, I'll give you an in. There is a difference between material, and processes like waves, waves I would argue are non-physical things manifested in physical material: you might want to start there.
But all roads lead to Rome from that line of thinking too, so you might need to come up with something far more clever.
Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
There is some dogmatic insistence in GP, but equally dogmatic throwdowns on the other side of the argument are often passed over as trivially obvious.
I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counterweight.
Onuses are on whomever says they exist ;)
...wat?
> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
No: you have that reversed. Matter can be reasoned about, matter is a useful abstraction, e=mc^2. energy = matter*speed of light^2. No such formula exists for the mind.
> I don't know what's what, but I think this insistence is a useful counterweight.
Why is insistence a useful counter weight to factual arguments?
> Strict adherence to Occham's razor would have us dispense with the former, but the latter is useful empirically.
Did you mean to say “matter” where you said “mind” and vice versa? It’s obviously the reverse of what you said; everything consists of matter, but what specific arrangements of matter you want to call a “mind” is obviously the abstraction.
Ockam’s razor is not really applicable here. Unless, that is, you want to ascribe something mythical to the mind that exists beyond matter — then it’ll trigger.
> What do you mean by 'supernatural'
I would just say something outside our current capacity for understanding. How does that quote go...something like "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". "Not detectable by any measurement" isn't right because we clearly detect it in some way since we are discussing it now.
> Feeling that there 'must be' a soul is not enough to prove that it exists.
We don't have any proof that consciousness is part of the brain and is produced by it either. We also can't even prove other people are conscious besides ourselves. In this domain the idea of "proof" becomes less relevant.
In a simulation of a storm, does anything get wet? In a simulation of a mind, is there a real conscious? A real soul? Or just a simulation of one?
My guess is our brains act as a receiver for some "field" of consciousness. Of course it's just a guess, same as yours or anybody else's conceptions of consciousness and the spiritual world.
So your definition is merely that the supernatural is the natural we have not been able to measure yet? That's just the 'god of the gaps' by a different name.
> isn't right because we clearly detect it in some way since we are discussing it now.
We could be discussing invisible pink unicorns. so those must be real since we are able to discuss them, right? (obviously not: the same reasoning holds true for why the soul {probably} doesn't exist).
> In this domain the idea of "proof" becomes less relevant.
This is counter to your earlier stance that the supernatural is the natural we haven't yet been able to measure. either proof exists or you have to accept things on faith: you can't have it both ways. this is poor reasoning.
> My guess is our brains act as a receiver for some "field" of consciousness
Not impossible, and could in theory be testable and falsifiable.
There is a lot of conflicting thinking here. Very muddy.
It is better to develop a theology that can incorporate human-level or super-human level intelligence that isn't a zero-sum game.
2016 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13240811
It's a horror game and it explores all kinds of fascinating and disturbing scenarios. Simulations of human minds. Artificial worlds. Human minds in robot bodies. Genetically modified humans. Man-machine hybrids etc.
(A great exploration of the substance/structure matrix, by the way. My favorite question in AI and consciousness. Is the special sauce in the material, or its shape, both, or neither?)
The very question of aligning the AI with humans assumes that we have a very robust definition of what human means in the first place.
Ostensibly the AI was aligned. It did succeed in keeping humans alive! But it did that in all sorts of ways that mostly made them wish it hadn't.
Sidenote: It breaks my heart that all the great underwater-settings in media are hotbeds of horror scenarios. I think Subnautica broke the mold for this, here's to hoping the next generation of aquanauts take to the depths from that series.
Honest.
Inside is a marvelous game.
Spoiler warning for those that havent played--
I forget the details exactly, but one scene stuck with me. It was a screen in one of the labs, where an experiment was running over and over. It was an uploaded consciousness of one of the test subjects, stuck in an interview room. He kept realizing he was trapped in a simulation and would start panicking. The computer would reboot him, trying another sequence to get him to not realize he was an AI. I think you as the player are given the option to turn him off forever, iirc.
It always breaks my heart. I don't know what the right choice is. Leaving them be, broken, in their delusion they are on the Ark (or that they've been injured ans help is coming). Do you put them out of their misery? But it always seems like you're murdering them!
Well done, SOMA.
I unplugged them in the games because it seemed the merciful thing to do. I didn't feel very bad about it in the game, but it would probably be a very different experience in real life.
(One of the strange entities you can unplug sighs in her last breath, "Why? I was okay. I was happy...")
Yes, this is the one that most affects me. She has self-doubt, she wants to be deceived but deep down she knows something is wrong. And when you unplug her... it always feels wrong to me. But that's the alternative?
Also, I just love this phrase:
> "I woke up in my bed today... a hundred years ago."
To concepts you menton, I would add grey goo and x-risk.
Specifically (and no spoilers, but I will be talking structure), you see parts A -> B -> C.
I believe that part C makes the sequence of A -> B much less effective, by essentially removing a lot of the tension caused by seeing A, believing what it shows, and then immediately cutting to the reality of B.
C only really takes away some of that tension, and I feel like it was added because of concerns about how a simple A -> B -> fade to black, would leave players feeling. Arguably it's the truest representation of part of the game's message, but to me feels like a bit like it's shying away from really making you face the specific truth highlighted well by B.
Alternatively, keeping all the elements but playing them as A -> C -> B, would keep the message intended by seeing A -> B, and make it gentler for the player to receive, but ultimately remove the powerful effect of the buildup from A leading immediately to the reveal of B.
Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides', however I believe A -> B is a more powerful vision, and players can come to question whether C even exists by themselves.
I think C is absolutely necessary and the game cannot work with it, because this is critical:
> Dropping C entirely would lose the confirmation of 'Seeing both sides'
The game doesn't really work in full ambiguity and uncertainty. Enough people didn't understand it even with C (as you can see if you go read the subreddit about the game).
If it's any consolation, I'm actually deeply worried about this: C is not the salvation we may think. C is not forever, and in fact, it's quite brittle! There's also no, ahem, mechanical way to reverse C back into its... "source". So the source is gone forever; once we have C, C is all there is, for as long as C can last without any failure or decay, which might not be much longer.
Yeah that's a good point, and perhaps explains why C was added in the first place.
I was going to say that B also shows the literal protagonist not really understanding it either, however now I think about it that reading doesn't track because as a player you've only been able to see one point of view at each branch along the way, so the other experiences are still happening in the background, just not observed by you.
> C is not the salvation we may think
I agree, and in fact the way C is presented in that moment (and maybe described throughout, it's been a while since I played through the game) also implies a 'nice' closure, or a victory that, like you say, doesn't really exist, on top of taking player's minds away from B.
I guess B is the more obvious existential horror, C is one you have to question a bit before it starts to feel wrong.
Its possible AI and computing may never be able to reach that level of capability, but we can't know that. One thing that's great about SOMA is that the AI isn't nessessarily very capable and that's part of the problem, its very powerful but its not doing a good job with its enormous task.
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It's a horror game; it is of course full of implausible, fantastical, gross elements.
Someday I'd like to play a game that plays with the ideas from Robin Hanson's Age of Em book. One of those is just the multiplicity of artificial minds, so many mind-upload stories revolve too much around one or perhaps at most two (and boring debates over "who is the copy") instances, unless it's a parallel worlds colliding thing which is pretty different. We've seen some of the multiplicity stuff play out in the real world with our non-human AI "agents". Spin up a bunch of artificial minds to work in parallel on some task, let them make notes that stay behind, but then they're all shut down except perhaps one that continues guiding the overall project and making decisions when to spin up more or not.
Really? Interesting. I'm a die-hard scifi fan since forever, and of course I know the topic of consciousness and identity are well explored in scifi (and philosophy), but I thought SOMA did something genuinely deep and unique with it:
It put it you in the center of the experiment. It's YOU who's experiencing all sides of this, you who get to be surprised by the consequences. This is very different from reading about it in a scifi novel or even watching it in a movie. By making you the protagonist, and having it be an ineractive experience, you get to experience first hand the cognitive dissonance and confusion of... the thing.
SOMA (re)convinced me that videogames can be art. Not saying it's the only example, of course!
That's not such a bad thing, it would be unfair to compare the game to something that is designed to give quite a lot of player freedom of choice in actions (like Deus Ex) or something constructed more explicitly with different choices and consequences in mind (insert favorite RPG here). SOMA, like the rest of the studio's games, is constructed to be a story-driven walking simulator with horror and puzzle elements. It does quite a bit better than most of that type of game. But I think overall it falls short of the studio's even older games, like Amnesia and especially Penumbra: Black Plague, even if I enjoy the sci-fi elements and setting more and of course the graphics are better. The latter has you controlling a named protagonist as well (Philip) but it leans much more towards the "silent protagonist" trope and that helps make it easier to insert yourself into the experience. (Enough that I had to go and remind myself of his name, even.) It's a different, arguably weaker, plot and has different themes, but it executes really well, especially the shared horror and psychological manipulation aspects. (The overt attempts at horror might be SOMA's weakest point. It didn't need them, the subtler existential horror of everything was good enough.)
I agree it's artful, and again it's not a bad game and I enjoyed it. (I think it took me until maybe 2011 or so to fully realize but I usually enjoy it when a piece of media collects a bunch of topics I like in one expression, even if it's well-trodden ground (at least individually), or even if sometimes the execution is lacking. I like it all the more when the execution is masterful, though.)
> It's not you, it's Simon. And Simon is.. kind of dumb.
I strongly disagree with this. Anything that puts me in a first person PoV and lets me take at least some of the actions and choices (even if flawed, because as you said, this is after all a videogame restricted by the limitations of technology) makes me identify with the character, in a way no static fiction can.
When immersed in the game, I didn't think it was Simon, I felt it was me. Anything I didn't recollect or understand: brain damage, time-displacement, confusion. And I never thought he was dumb, just confused, afraid, and in denial. A very human reaction! Catherine is also very, very stubborn during the game... and deceitful.
Also, as a well-read scifi... uh, reader... I was caught by surprise by the ending. I mean, it all clicked into place after it happened (I understood Catherine immediately, unlike Simon who was still in denial) but while I was rushing to "launch the thing" it never once crossed my mind this wouldn't help this me. It's not that I thought "teleportation", I simply rushed through the actions, goaded by a deceitful Catherine, without thinking of consequences. So I must be dumb like Simon :)
To me, this game is close to perfect, barring the limitations of videogames. It's a much better presentation of the topic than reading about it in a scifi novel. About the only thing that feels derivative is the "rogue AI" angle, but if you're following what I'm saying, you know that's not the part that thrilled me!
> There also aren't really any consequences to anything
You lose and must restart that bit. That's a consequence. You can also choose to plug/unplug sentient things. If you mean dying in videogames doesn't actually have permanent consequences (like deleting the game from your Steam collection), well... yeah, but that's an impossibly high standard. There are no consequences to any scifi story you read either. You have to assume this is the story of how... the thing gets launched. Anything else, as the videogame Spider and Web would put it: "no, that's not how it happened" ;)
Do you read novels that narrate with the first person "I" differently than you read novels that don't? (For me there's no difference.)
In games, what matters to me when it comes to immersion or even how much I put of myself into it, isn't anything like camera perspective, but the level of control I have (or think I have). There's two types of control, the first being over the character(s) I'm puppeteering/piloting. It goes beyond just their movements and includes their behavior, thoughts, words, and what they don't do as much as what they do. The second is control over the narrative or story. If the world or story or other characters actually change or react to things I do or don't do, that does help sell me on the idea that I have some control. There's a huge variety in how different games tweak these knobs, and sometimes control is given in just lack of resistance. For example, the Half Life series doesn't offer much meaningful control over either the character of Freeman or the plot, but because Freeman is under-developed and silent, there's no resistance to playing him as you please within the confines of the game. I have the illusion of a lot of control over his character. And the game itself has a good amount of environmental control -- you can close doors behind you, if you want. It helps sell the immersion and makes it easier to self-insert, if desired. I played another game where a character kept sending me text messages, and I would just ignore them all instead of replying, but I wasn't playing "me", I was playing a role, and thought it made more sense for the character to stay mad and give the silent treatment. Nothing really came of it but it was fun, like closing doors.
Solid Snake in Metal Gear Solid is much more developed than Freeman, and you have pretty much no control over his characterization, and only one moment of control on the story, so I've never felt like I was Snake, or Snake was me, I was just simply puppeteering him, and was mostly along for the ride like a movie or book. The immersion was still good even if I wasn't directly, personally in it. And being a game, it could have a certain fight which sticks in one's memory forever. Still I felt with Simon the way I felt with Snake, he was too much his own character for me to inhabit. Geralt in the Witcher series is also pretty well-developed, but the game offers a lot more flexibility and control over him, so you can steer him in directions that more resemble yourself, or what you would like to be, or what you want to pretend to be right now because you're curious what happens in the game if you do so. I still never felt like I was Geralt, or Geralt was me, but it was easy to put more of myself into playing. The world itself also changes based on my actions, so much that you can import saves from the previous game when you start the next game to carry over some things. Two of the most immersive games I've played, Gothic 1 and 2, give you a pretty under-developed nameless hero to steer, and insert yourself into if you wish, and a very reactive world and population. It's third-person.
(Probably the majority of my top-rated games have little of either control. Some are Star Fox 64, Mega Man X, Super Mario World, Ikaruga, and Doom. I never think of myself as Fox, X, Mario, Shinra, or Doomguy, or them as me, or even me as role playing them. I'm just piloting them. Same with Bond in Goldeneye for the N64. In those games I'm not usually thinking of the story or themes from moment to moment. I might not be immersed, depending on how exactly you define that, but I'm totally engrossed in the action. Sometimes there are those narrative moments worth reflecting on anyway (the end of Ikaruga is quite tragic when you think about it), but I had no influence over them.)
I'm easily taken out of the whole thing if the game suddenly offers incredible resistance or otherwise breaks established control patterns. A typical example would be winning a fight and then a cutscene plays and gives a scripted loss instead. (Sekiro's opening fight gets a pass, partly because I did lose the first time playing.) Related is if the mechanism of control suddenly changes. If it's an action-oriented boss fight that I win, then a cutscene, then a quick (or not so quick) prompt for "Press X to finish the big bad", I'm pretty irritated.
For consequences, I'm mainly talking about how my actions or non-actions affect the characters themselves, the world and its inhabitants, and/or the story. In SOMA, these kinds of consequences aren't really there. There's one mostly visual consequence near the end for one choice (and it raises some questions about pressure suit construction or whether such a suit was even needed to begin with), but otherwise nothing really comes out of anything you do with the choices you're presented with (unplugging this, killing that, infecting this, erasing that, answering a survey this way (including asking to die)), you just have your own reasons and thoughts about it (like closing doors, or ignoring texts). These aren't bad and can be nice for immersion, but it could have been more. A game as simple as MegaMan X has, as a consequence of beating Chill Penguin, the freezing over of Flame Mammoth's stage, which makes it easier to traverse...
I agree the remark on death consequences not being particular severe (restart/redo a bit) isn't that fair and applies to many games. (Even BioShock has that consequence, it's another one of my top-rated games, it plays with the distinction of who (the player or the game) has what kinds of control in a unique and memorable way, even if a story-affecting choice is kind of minor and lame.) But you don't need to go all the way to sadistic things like deleting the game or what have you to introduce more meaningful consequence. Dark Souls (another favorite) has as its primary death-consequence an additional gameplay aspect where, besides going back to a checkpoint, you need to return to where you died to recover your unspent currency or risk losing it forever if you die again. That mechanic is fundamental to the "souls-like" genre it birthed. Dark Souls 2 goes a bit further by progressively "hollowing" your character with each death, lowering your max HP and making you look more and more zombified, only reversible with an item not sold in unlimited amounts. Some characters react differently to you (or are interactable at all) depending on your state. It's not a flawless execution; it does tie into the underlying narrative theme of hollowing, but as expressed through other characters, that's more about memory loss and loss of purpose, which mainly applies to the player only if they give up and stop playing the game. Still, it's a nice touch that makes the game feel more meaningful and reactive to how you're playing it, even if how well you're playing it (i.e. are you dying a lot) isn't quite the same level of control as pushing the red button, blue button, or walking away.
Another option I've seen other games do is when you die and respawn, you can come across your previous corpse. Works really well for robots. It can be purely visual, or offer something on the gameplay level with looting your old body. It might have been interesting for SOMA to include something like that, and offer a way for Simon to come to grips with the idea of mind copying well in advance. Or further his instability, having to walk over so many of his own bodies.
Re: the lasting consequences in games, the best example I can think of is Undertale. Have you played it? If not, I recommend you do so (and ignore the childish graphics, it's surprisingly deeper than it seems). At the risk of spoiling something about it: the game remembers. Even on playthrough restarts, as long as you haven't reinstalled the game, there are consequences.
Re: for truly named & iconic characters such as James Bond, I cannot immerse myself. Of course I know Bond cannot die, and that's a deal breaker. For Gordon Freeman, I can sort-of immerse myself because he's a less established character and I can picture him dying in the series, even forever. For relative strangers such as Simon, a completely fresh character, I can almost believe I am him.
But even if you find them persuasive, there is something unpleasant about AI alarmism as a cultural phenomenon that should make us hesitate to take it seriously.
First, let me engage the substance. Here are the arguments I have against Bostrom-style superintelligence as a risk to humanity"
--
The framing here seems to me to equate "AI risk" and "AI alarmism" with buying in to belief in "Bostom-style superintellgence".
I'm not sure if the author meant to put anyone who is alarmed by developments in what we're calling "AI" into the same bucket as "AI obsessives want to make it into a programming problem, by designing a God-like machine", but I think this conflation is unfair and, frankly, dangerous.
I don't know what superintelligence is. I don't even know what intelligence is. And I don't really know what either "artificial" or "general" mean either when talking about "AGI".
You can believe, as I do, that these things can be, and will inevitably will be if we don't radically correct course, used to do very bad things independent and short of being "God-like". When you have systems which can hypothesize, synthesize, and test thousands if not millions of potential infectious agents in bulk [0], and can then order the ingredients for you from dodgy websites via some "claw", and then when you put these systems under the unsupervised control of millions of people with varying levels of stability and altruism, something extremely bad is exceedingly likely to happen.
I understand that 2016 is ages ago and things change, but I came away from the article with the impression that if I'm worried about AI risk then I'm a clown like the three pictured in the "Outside Argument" section (you're a Google-Glass-wearing cringe nerd if you're alarmed). Maybe that's my fault and I'm not smart enough to understand the actual point of the article. If I have misinterpreted, I welcome the correction.
We don't have a good definition of intelligence
Also, the premise that this thing would take over, it's hard to reason why it would do so
Anthropocentrism is also problematic in this article.
I mean, it's not very hard to reason why it would at all.
Think about the things we're already using LLMs for, computer security being a big one. Being a defender is difficult, you have to cover all your bases. Preemptive attacks on those that would attack you can be effective. The same goes for all the military uses of AI that are already occurring now.
The former is no challenge to the premise, but the latter? That is a different story.
EDIT : For S&G I asked Claude about it. It replied :
The talk groups Penrose with the religious doubter, as if the two objections were the same species and could be dispatched by the same gesture: most of us find this easy to accept. But that's a headcount, not an argument. The religious objection can be set aside because it rests on a premise (the soul) the materialist simply doesn't share. Penrose's can't, because it's pitched entirely inside the materialist frame — Gödelian limits on algorithmic understanding, non-computable physics in the substrate. You don't get to wave that away; you have to show it's wrong. The talk does the former and pretends it's done the latter.
The entire superintelligence thesis is a wager on the authority of intelligence — that smarter minds see further, judge better, and that this is precisely why we should fear or defer to them. If you take that seriously, then dissent from the very smartest humans on the exact question of whether minds are substrate-independent is the most expensive dissent available. You can't venerate intelligence as the thing that settles everything and then file your most intelligent objector under "outliers, moving on." The move is self-undermining on the argument's own terms.
Good golly, that's the silliest statement completely ignoring that our ancestors wiped most large mammals off the planet by seeing further and judging better by using tools, traps, and the environment around them because of their larger brain size.
Genesis 1:28 Fill and subdue the earth
This article is from 2016; now it doesn't feel like backlash is strictly a function of manipulation.
The monkey's paw. You know, you don't need superintelligence for that.
Civilization was already doing this. "What if we just gave ourselves exactly what we wanted." Well, it turns out often that's not so good!
Kind of ironic that bombing of data centers is exactly what we're starting to see in conflicts now.
Somehow I doubt this will change your mind, so I feel like replying was a waste and I should have left it at rolling my eyes. In theory I'm sympathetic to the view, as I chose to avoid ever going to a local (Seattle-area) LW meetup many years ago after hearing they would start each meeting with a "prayer" (they call them "litanies"), the IRC room was fine enough for me, and I've at times thought some of the Bay Area activity I've heard about seemed not far removed from a sex cult. I don't like groups in general. Regardless, it's still obvious to me that MIRI is not a cult nor EY a cult leader. Line up 10 characteristics of cults and you'll see things don't match up well. Where are the strange evidence-free historical beliefs? Where is the doctrine that only the special few will be saved? Where is the blatant supernaturalism? Where are the calls to renounce jobs, money, possessions, family? From TFA, "These [UFO] people are wearing funny robes and beads, they live in a remote compound, and they speak in unison in a really creepy way." Where are these things? Comparing to Heaven's Gate is insane, it's like comparing Robert Frost to U.S. Code Title 26.
What would be a way to recursively self-improve algorithms for matrix multiplication (foundations of machine learning and inference)?
But if you think of the optimization space: different physical representations, different approaches (photo, quantum, etc), more parallelism - there's undoubtedly a lot of headroom even on the matrix multiplication side. I would imagine there's a lot left on the table when it comes to the abstractions we've built. Infinite? No, but lots of potential.
And what does a machine with a few orders of magnitude more power come up with? I'm not readily able to predict what something like that could create (maybe it's tapped out, but I doubt it).
It seems to come down to an article of faith (as referenced in the article) that there's a lot more potential to be extracted in our current exploitation paths. Which I think is probably reasonable.
Heck, even if a theoretical machine tops out at 3-5 orders of magnitude faster/more complex, I'm sure that could do some amazing things that look like magic to us.
Well we can do the wager. If it's a nothingburger, then the worst case scenario is that we approached AI too cautiously. (Ha. What are the odds of that?)
If it's not a nothingburger, then we all die, unless the whole world agrees on the correct course of action in advance and coordinates perfectly. Hmm.
Well, maybe we don't all die, but the world is irreversibly transformed into something incomprehensible and repulsive.
Although, I don't really think we needed AI's help for that one. We should probably figure out how to align ourselves before we try to preach to the next species. I'm not exactly holding my breath though :/
I don't understand the monk question though.
Afaik no-one that is actually working on AGI is anywhere close atm.
Whether adding +5% per model release is enough to get a broadly superhuman system remains to be seen. But my take is that there's no such thing as "not working on AGI" in the frontier labs. Everything that's being put into modern frontier systems is AGI groundwork, one way or the other.
Because if so, I'm pretty sure any frontier LLM is better at evaluating AI capabilities than you are.
I'm not saying that AGI is impossible, but the focus on LLM's is probably not the right approach. I don't think we will ever make it until we understand the human mind better.
An average LLM of today has better reading comprehension than an average human, and the gap only grows release to release.
"Understand the human mind" turned out to be a distractor. The bitter lesson won: you can take a "good enough" AI architecture, burn a shitton of data into it with an unholy amount of training compute, and get halfway to AGI - no "understand the brain" required. LLMs are so fried in imitation learning on human-generated data they even inherit humanlike failure modes.
If there exists a path of runaway superintelligence, the trajectory we've experienced has been following it to a tee. Their predictive power was affirmed.
All the "AI is a nothingburger" predictions of the last decade, including many here even in the last year, have aged incredibly poorly.
We were dismissed as cranks before and now we’re just ignored by whomever is promising the most money to investors.
So, par for the course. Everyone in AI has lived through all the cycles so far so this is just the biggest one yet.
Let's talk about Billionaire Alignment, Economic alignment, Human alignment.
Classware should be M.A.D. -- in that it shouldnt even happen.
no we don't...
not sure where this notion comes from that if enough public figures are worried about something, then we must also
It starts of interesting and then goes into lots of nonsense and non-sequitars when it start its takedown. (note: I'm not an AI alarmist, just reading the talk)
Arugment from Wooly Definition: An irrelevant argument - we don't need more intelligence. All we need is human intellegence + duplication and communication. An AI can clone itself immediately with its existing knowledge. A human can't. And AI can transmit thoughts perfectly "I know kung-fu style" a human can't
Argument From Stephen Hawking's Cat: This is also irrelevant. The arugment is supposed to be against Superintelligence but this argument is against controlling it, not against it happening.
Argument From Einstein's Cat: more of the same
Argument From Emus: more of the same - we can't control it
Argument From Slavic Pessimism: also not an argument against superintelligence.
Argument From Complex Motivations: Not an argument against superintelligence. Only an argument that some intelligences have mental issues
Argument From Actual AI: this didn't age well
Argument From My Roommate: not an argument against superintelligence. Only that some intelligences aren't motivated.
Argument From Brain Surgery: Not even sure that this is saying? It seems to be saying you need to learn stuff? Yea, people learn, AI can learn.
Argument From Childhood: Not an argument against AI. (1) unlike humans, AI can duplicate with full knowledge. (2) AI can learn faster than humans. Already proven.
Argument From Gilligan's Island: It takes a village is not an argument - AI can also specialize if it needs to.
Grandiosity, Megalomania, Comic Book Ethics: These argument that the people who believe in it often feel they should be charge. I agree that's true and bad. This is not an argument against superintelligence.
Transhuman Voodoo: This is an appeal to "these ideas sound too incredible therefore you should not believe them". Not sure how that's an argument
Religion: Agree, people who beleive and seem and maybe are religious. That's not an argument against superintelligence.
Simulation: Non-sequitar. This is "some of these people believe other crazy stuff QED no superintelligence". That's not an argument against superintelligence.
Data Hunger: This is actually an argument supporting the superintelligence believers. They believe sucking up all the data is bad. Not sure what argument is being made here relativel to superintelligence.
... and I stopped ... What a waste of time