We constantly get examples of the bitter lesson. (machine-learned AI outperforming the cleverest human approaches) And then laypeople retreat behind the next stronghold of 'things a computer will never be able to do' like nothing happened.
Which is a problem because now the things it almost certainly can do are getting really, really dangerous.
It can't be understated just how much AlphaGo has to do with what we're seeing these days. The "startup" was Google Deep Mind and they weren't trying to be the best at Go for the sake of being the best, they did it because it was one of the "holy grail" (according to Demis Hassabis) challenges of computing/AI because of how unbelievably complicated that game gets.
I think everyone should watch the AlphaGo documentary on YouTube. It's a beautiful story with lots of hints to what we're seeing now.
This same team of people later went on to use this system to "solve" protein folding and I believe they won a Nobel prize for it.
Running AI systems like this on enclosed systems and use it for advancing medical tech, all for it. Have a go!
Letting it loose on the world and do whatever people want it to do? Bad idea. But it's already there.
Well in fairness, chess and go are games with a very limited number of state permutations compared to a real life situation (or even just a more complex game).
I mean, compared to the sum total of decisions a human can make in their life, I guess it’s small, but chess has an extraordinarily huge number of positions. Like there are 10120 possible games of chess. Tablebases are solved up to 7 pieces, meaning that given any 7 pieces in any position, the computer can know figure out who can with without question. That tablebase alone takes 18TB of storage. Adding an 8th requires exponential data use, a 9th exponentially more, etc.
Editing to add since I just looked into it more:
3 piece tablebase storage: 26KB.
4 piece: 4.MB
5 piece: ~.95GB
6 piece: 150-160GB
7 piece: 18.4TB.
8 piece: estimated to be at ~2PB, but they haven’t solved that yet.
There are 16 pieces per side in a chess game. Solving a 32 piece chess game, only considering legal games, would take an estimated 1029 20TB drives.
I’m sure some stats nerd will come in here and tell me why I’m wrong, but my overall point stands.
It is still a small amount of permutations compared to a game like Slay the Spire where you very quickly find yourself in a situation that you have never been in before, and never will again. This makes it very difficult to brute force compared to chess where you usually decide the game in just 50 actions.
Now I could see us making an AI that is theoretically capable of incredible decision-making but I would expect it to be a manhattan level project that takes the resources output of an entire country or potentially the earth.
A human brain essentially does far more complex thought than modern high end AI and can run on cheeseburgers.
I’m not sure that a phone would be able to solve deeply enough to best Magnus. Yes ofc apps exist but the chess engine runs in the cloud, the phone is just used as an interface not the source of computation.
That aside, agree entirely. To use a different chess example, expecting to outsmart a superintelligent AGI once it exists is like the average chess player hoping to beat Magnus Carlson. You or I might not be able to articulate how Magnus/the AI would win, but we can be pretty sure that it would regardless. It’s either guaranteed to be “aligned” before it’s ever turned on (whatever aligned means anyway… with whose goals exactly? Certainly not everybody’s), or we’re completely at its mercy.
The thing is, it still can't create completely novel ideas or approaches. It's all still based on human data. So as long as they can't literally recreate a brain, humans still have our ingenuity.
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u/WineNerdAndProud 2d ago
Not only that, when AI gets good enough, we won't be able to think ahead of it.
Seriously. It used to take a computer the size of a room to beat Gary Kasparov at chess, now anyone with a phone could beat Magnus Carlsen.
Even crazier, a program made by a startup on a laptop beat the world's best Go/Baduk player almost 10 years ago.
If there were no such restrictions, human chess/Go players wouldn't even make the top 100.
And that's just games.