Guillaume Verdon: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You mentioned singularity earlier. How far away are we from a singularity? I don’t know if I believe in a finite time singularity as a single point in time. I think it’s going to be asymptotic, and sort of a diagonal sort of asymptote. We have the light cone, we have the limits of physics restricting our ability to grow. So, obviously can’t fully diverge on a finite time. I think my priors are that I think a lot of people on the other side of the aisle think that once we reach human level AI, there’s going to be an inflection point, and a sudden [inaudible 02:25:48], suddenly AI is going to grok how to manipulate matter at the nano scale, and assemble nanobots. And having worked for nearly a decade in applying AI to engineer matter, it’s much harder than they think. And in reality, you need a lot of samples from either a simulation of nature that’s very accurate and costly, or nature itself, and that keeps your ability to control the world around us in check. There’s a sort of minimal cost computationally, and thermodynamically, to acquiring information about the world in order to be able to predict and control it. And that keeps things in check. It’s funny you mentioned the other side of the aisle. So, in the poll I posted about p(doom) yesterday, what’s the probability of doom? There seems to be a nice division between people think it’s very likely, and very unlikely. I wonder if in the future there’ll be the actual Republicans versus Democrats division, blue versus red? Is the AI doomers versus the e/accers, EAC? [inaudible 02:26:53].…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.