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On Inevitability

borretti.me · 2,002 words · saved by 2 readers

Why superintelligent AI is not inevitable.

There’s a widespread belief that artificial superintelligence (ASI) is inevitable. In this post, I argue that this is false, and believing it is upstream of a lot of bad discourse. Why do people believe it? It’s easy to believe. Samuel Butler, already in 1863, observed that machines are improving faster than humans are improving. Today, AI systems are gaining capabilities much faster than humans: in five years we went from systems that can barely string together a sentence to autonomous cybercrime. Biological nervous systems have many virtues, like being power-efficient (because they run…

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