[ExI] Google’s Go Victory Is Just a Glimpse of How Powerful AI Will Be

Robin D Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu
Tue Feb 2 16:18:00 UTC 2016


>>> More practically I think the Wired article gets things right: this is
>>> a big deal commercially. Solving tricky value functions is worth money
>>> - and if they do generalize to hand-eye coordination, then we will
>>> have a practical robot revolution. But even merely software good value
>>> functions might be a huge deal when applied to logistics and other
>>> kinds of planning. Or advertising.
>> 
>> If this is a big deal commercially, it is odd that release of this news
>> didn’t bump the google stock price, nor the value of the tech sector as
>> a whole. Not sure it has bumped the price of any identifiable related
>> commercial sector.

Alejandro Dubrovsky <alito at organicrobot.com> wrote: 
> The games were played back in October, and insiders would have known that it was doing remarkably well even before that.
> Here's Nvidia's stock price:
> https://au.finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=NVDA&t=2y&l=on&z=l&q=l&c=

Brian Atkins <brian at posthuman.com> wrote:
> I believe the market had a down day last Wednesday, however GOOG outperformed the market average that day. And on the days after that it also outperformed most stocks, to now become the most valuable company according to some news headlines I saw yesterday. It looks like for example it significantly outperformed AAPL in the time period since this Go news broke?


Even if we could credit the entire gain from mid October to this one tech advance, a pretty heroic assumption, that would still only let us attribute a few tens of billions of present value of future profit to this tech. World product today is about $100T, and present value of future product is >20X more. So at best this one part in ~100,000 of future world value. Not nothing, but remotely what one would expect if this were indicating that full human level AI is coming soon. 

(And why do my posts keep taking a day to appear here?)

Robin Hanson rhanson at gmu.edu 
Future of Humanity Inst., Oxford University
Assoc. Prof. Economics, George Mason University
See my new book: http://ageofem.com













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