I'm not here to defend sama, but certain things cannot be proven until they arrive - they can only be extrapolated from existing observations and theoretical limits.
Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber.
Maybe sama is right, maybe not, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
I'm sure you know that people in the AI community have been predicting big things ever since, I don't know, the 1970s? It's only 10 years away again. This time it's for real, right?
Alchemists predicted the transmutation of metals into gold for centuries, and on a sunny day in the 20th century, it arrived (a bit radioactive, but still).
Unless the human brain is made of some sacred substance, the worst-case scenario is that we will extrapolate current scanning methods into the future and run the scanned model in silica. I'm not recommending this "just for fun," but the laws of physics don't forbid it.
If you are comparing AI to alchemy, a subject that after thousands of years still isn’t delivering on its promises (even with the assistance of modern technological magic), then surely you can see how that’s something of a self-own.
>Alchemists predicted the transmutation of metals into gold for centuries, and on a sunny day in the 20th century, it arrived (a bit radioactive, but still).
So is Sam Altman the modern day alchemist? Making predictions based on faulty methods and faulty understanding (per your gold example)?
What will happen is that we'll shift the economy around based on inflated tech promises and ruin people's lives. No big deal I guess.
The AI predictions based on Moore's law type reasoning by Kurzweil, Moravec etc have been pretty accurate and not subject to the it's always 10 years ahead thing.
I have little doubt that even when we have superintelligent AI solving science and such problems way beyond humans it will still be dismissed as extra spicy autocomplete.
I agree. He's probably been conditioned by experience to speak with confidence until proven wrong ("strong opinions, weakly held"), but I don't like it either. Oh... the lost art of saying, "In my opinion."
Hah, atomic power is a great point of comparison: people in the "atomic age" expected atomic power to be everywhere. Electricity too cheap to measure, cars/planes/appliances all powered by small nuclear reactors... That's without going into the real nonsense like radium toothpaste.
And here we are today where nuclear energy is limited to nuclear weapons, a small set of military vehicles and <10% of the world's electricity production. Not nothing, sure, but nothing like past predictions either.
Last I checked the giant nuclear fusion reactor in the sky is driving an substantial increase in solar energy.
The toothpaste and similar products were pretty ill advised, vaseline and uranium glass are still collectable and are seeing a ressurrence of new interest: https://old.reddit.com/r/uraniumglass/
Imagine the Uranium Committee of early 40's, where Szilard and others were babbling about 10kg of some magical metal exploding briefly with the power of a sun, with the best evidence being some funky trail in an alcohol vapor chamber.
Maybe sama is right, maybe not, but the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.