Why even assume sentience or consciousness in the first place.

Because 100% of all existing sentient agents have goals, desires, or objectives outside of what they're told to do.

I followed NIF's progress a decade ago, I stopped when they gave up and went back to nuclear weapons research. I was skeptical and still am of a fusion power plant looking anything like their setup. I think there is at least 1 private effort following their general approach. I fear this is just scientific progress that doesn't necessarily quicken progress to a power plant. But I would be happy if it only serves to boost funding for fusion engineering efforts.

>Clearly, we have already achieved narrow super intelligence

It's very good at what it was trained to do, probabilistic prediction of human text. Use it outside of that context and it will fail unexpectedly and badly.

Not no chance, just unlikely.

could, yes.

That possible future transition isn't guaranteed. A few broadly capable AGIs in the world that are tightly controlled would make that transition less likely. Many easily replicated AGI systems in the world would make it more likely, but it would also make it more likely you would not survive long enough to enjoy it.

The Economics of Automation: What Does Our Machine Future Look Like?

>This thing apparently knows everything from its vast training data

This AI tool is just predicting the next word based on your prompt and training data, it doesn't actually know anything in the way you mean it. The AI architectures you need to worry about does not currently exist. Existing architectures improved to 99.99% accuracy will not turn them into the AIs you need to worry about.

I don't think any improvements in existing models changes the AGI landscape. Existing architectures perfected to 99.99% accuracy gets you a bunch of narrow/weak super intelligent models and not AGI. If you had millions of those for every economically useful task, that would pass for AGI.

R&D needs to max out on existing architectures before they will seriously branch out and search the possibility space for something that will get you a proper learning algorithm.

If you want AGI, you will need the R&D community to realize existing models won't get them what they want and they need to explore elseware.

I think you will have to wait for attrition to clear the field of the bulk of pre 1980s generations before you have a shot at a UBI in the US, perhaps ~2050s.

Depends on your end stage expectations for vr. If it's simply PS5 realism in a vr helmet, then you'll get that in Zuck's metaverse time horizon, 3-15 years. I ultimately expect the vr will be a letdown because of the interface, there is nothing on the likely tech roadmap that will make vr interface with the human body as good as fiction. You will need something from an alternate tech tree derived from some future white swan event.

How does this video relate to "standalone VR/AR/MR will flourish and popularize in the 2020s"?

They were simply willing to cut the most corners, the way American industry operated before dumping toxic waste in the nearest stream was frowned upon.

The problem is the global value of rare earth imports was only $1.15 billion back in 2019. It's not a huge market, but it involves a lot of cost on the processing end. It's not just about mining.

> They don't have the cheapest source they just sell at the lowest price just to have control.

That makes China the cheapest source.

Good luck to any country that think they can beat their prices without turning their own countryside into an hellscape

> was just chosen by Google to build early...

It's no accident. Python was about as close to the description "programmer" as academic scientists wanted to get.

China doesn't have a monopoly, they're simply the cheapest source the past many decades.

The US has lots of plans.

Humans to Mars: Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950–2000

>Assuming you believe, like most people, that quantum computers are just a super faster kind of computer you can just install Linux and use like usual.

While what you're imagining probably isn't realistic, there are some theoretical Quantum speedups that could benefit AI. Lookup quantum-machine-learning & quantum-memristor if you're interested. Even if AI running on Q hardware doesn't pan out, AGI will likely make heavy use of Q the same way humans will, via an API accessed from more classic hardware.

The end result could be the same even if the exact implementation details of "AGI run on a quantum computer" is not what you envisioned. An AGI could theoretically setup Q calculation in a pipeline and analyze the result a lot faster than humans could. Humans slowly experimentally exploring a possibility space over decades, that time window could be greatly compressed if an AGI does the work, the exact degree of improvement and speedup of resulting breakthroughs is debatable.

This is an engineered system and not just some singular large fined tuned model. I like the continued progress in this direction, even the various proposed "learning agents" points in this direction. I still expect and hope it remains more likely that AGI will be a CAIS like system.

Yes, most tend to confuse current AI tools with future AI and their associated capabilities.

There are no guarantees existing r&d efforts will result in a technological savior within your time horizon. There is no master plan, society is comprised of a bunch of individual money-making efforts. if the medicine that cures whatever ails you isn't profitable, you are not going to survive. Nothing can exist unless it has a high profit potential vs risk, there are always easier ways to make money.

>we lived through the ice age

Humans, not necessarily you individually, can survive the worst end of the AGW prediction range over the next 75 years. Just don't be poor. Would you prefer to spend your time trying to survive in such an environment or in the temperate interglacial that coincided with the rise of technological human civilization.

>what you just think by 2050 we'll be sitting on our asses doing nothing to prevent a mass extinction?

Why not, doing nothing is easy. Was anything done to prevent mass extinctions over the preceding 30 years.

I'm only aware of 1 pathway that can improve extant nanofabrication, and that has gone nowhere in 30 years. There were easier ways to make money.

Economics of scale, the world is big.

>The newest EUV machines are state of the art producing the smallest feature sizes in nanofabrication and costs > $350m a piece. There are a few hundred of previous versions in existence in the world and lead times for the old versions are 12-18months. This tech is currently used to spit out semiconductor wafers before they're chopped up into chips, a large fab might produce 250k wafers a month.

You're going to need a high-tech manufacturing stack like semiconductors to manufacture your nanobots. It will take decades to ramp capacity, available capacity will land in the hands of the highest bidders. Also, 60 year olds trying to stay alive will be competing for the retail product with 30-year Olds trying to look like they're 20 years Olds.

It depends on a lot of factors. If medical nanobots to reverse aging are created tomorrow, I would not expect your avg 60-year-old to survive long enough to get access to them.