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View submission: Ask Anything Wednesday - Physics, Astronomy, Earth and Planetary Science
This is very much dependent on how you're defining things.
AGI is usually defined in reference to human intelligence, but it may very much be a fool's errand to attempt to replicate this outside human wetware. Which computations are efficient depends a great deal on the hardware in which they're performed. For example, there are problems which quantum computers can solve efficiently that classical/digital computers can still solve, but not efficiently[1]. In the language of computational complexity theory, this is captured by the difference between the complexity classes BQP and BPP. Respectively, bounded quantum polynomial and bounded probabilistic polynomial. Basically, both mean that if you're performing a calculation with some amount of randomness in the process (which is inherent in quantum computing), the problem can be solved on the quantum and classical (respectively) hardware efficiently.
1: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/bqpph.pdf
Why do I bring that up? Because it may not make sense to try to engineer human-like intelligence outside the structure for which it is optimized. So it's more useful to think of intelligence in a much more general (no connection to the "general" in AGI) sense. I don't believe there's a universally accepted definition of intelligence, but as a mathematician I think of it in terms of an agent with at least the following key features (though I may have forgotten something. A more extensive discussion can be found here[2] if desired):
2: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1902.09980.pdf
1. Using data to generate and update a set of probabilistic models each corresponding to some system or process.
2. Using these models to guide behavior in a wide (loosely defined) set of environments.
3. Said behavior including some amount of active search for information to further improve the models in a feedback loop.
To a corvid[3] - if we imagine them to have a human level of awareness - the human ability to write or use our hands may seem meaningless and trivial. By contrast, their abilities in navigation and unpowered flight would seem essential and our lack of them would seem a critical deficit. This is perhaps a silly example, but my intent is to convey that the use of "general" in AGI is very much anthropocentric. Future superintelligent AI, should they come to exist, will likely appear very, very alien to us - if not wholly incomprehensible. In fact, a tag team of mathematicians and philosophers showed that the problem of predicting the behavior of a superintelligent AI is fundamentally unsolvable. Not just practically, but unavoidably because of the mathematical nature of computation. This article[4] is a non-technical discussion of the problem, and depending on your level of interest in AGI you might really enjoy it.
4: https://jair.org/index.php/jair/article/view/12202/26642
As far as fusion, it's more a question of how efficient that power generation will turn out to be. There's probably more nuance, but I'm no plasma physicist so my understanding is limited.
But what are we confident will be feasible? The most exciting example I kow of is relatively low-velocity but commonplace travel around the solar system, along with human colonies in various locations. I say "relatively low-velocity" to distinguish the current and highly fuel-efficient but slow approach to travel within the solar system from that of hypothetical "torchships[5]". The latter would disregard launch windows and slingshots (though almost certainly not all impacts of orbital mechanics on fuel efficiency) and instead simply burn a great deal of fuel. Alternatively, once we have established a space presence as a species it could be casual, all things considered, to make use of Project Orion[6]'s extremely efficient yet high-speed means of traveling within the solar system. The historical and present difficulties are the issues of treaties against nuclear armaments in space, and more crucially the immense danger of poisoning the atmosphere on the way to orbit.
5: http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/torchships.php
6: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)
Comment by NikStalwart at 03/11/2022 at 11:11 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hi, and thank you for your detailed response. It has only recently landed in my inbox despite being posted a month ago (probably because it was waiting for pre-approval by the mod team).
In fact, a tag team of mathematicians and philosophers showed that the problem of predicting the behavior of a superintelligent AI is fundamentally unsolvable.
I very much agree with this. When the first natural language neural networks were beginning to become "mainstream" some 10 years ago, I recall quite a lot of people were remarking how *alien* they were.
Having said that, I have two definitions of artificial "general" intelligence, a utilitarian one and a legal one:
1. An intelligence capable of (efficiently and correctly) solving a comparable amount of problems relative to a mentally healthy and decently-educated human (utilitarian); and
2. Something you'd get 25 years for if you do `rm -rf /` to it (legal).
The second definition is a little tongue-in-cheek and, perhaps, somewhat circular, but I think it is worth considering. At what point is it no longer okay to reinstall your operating system because it has developed a personality and can make decisions? Are we going to be holding war crimes trials for the genocide of Clippy?
The first one is more practical: there are some very impressive AI projects out there: protein folding, natural text-to-speech, summarization. But each of these AIs has been purpose-built to perform one task. Meanwhile, a single human can present oral arguments in Court in a commercial dispute, fix a flat, help his son with some trigonometry homework and bake a cake. And all of that probably in one day. Meanwhile I can't get Cortana to tell me the time properly, nevermind the trigonometry or cake-baking part.
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On the topic of low-velocity space travel, I think you are right. Indications are that it will become ever more prevalent over the coming decades. But I don't think it will become as individually impactful as the videocall and smartphone were/are. A smartphone can be had for $150. Elon Musk wants to bring the cost of a one-way ticket to Mars down to $100k (I believe this is from Lex Fridman Podcast #252). I'm sure many people will have both the cash and the desire to take him up on that offer, but I don't see it being as universally and individually impactful to humanity as the internet, et cetera. At the very least, space travel (more specifically, the trip to orbit) is physically demanding and many people will be physically unable to make the journey.
That aside, alternative forms of launch/propulsion are actually very interesting to me. Something like Spinlaunch might be more practical on a body with weaker gravity and thinner atmosphere than it is on Earth, and I wonder if there's enough extraterrestrial uranium around to where you could circumvent the environmental concerns of launching nuclear-powered spacecraft from Earth.