[ExI] AI thoughts

[Keith Henson]

"Google's AlphaZero was provided only the rules of chess, but through
self-play quickly discovered and mastered all the common openings that
took humans centuries to discover"

I wonder if this has any real-world significance.

I suspect that all the knowledge possible will not result in FTL or
time travel.  If what we see at Tabby's star is alien megastructures,
then they don't seem to have found a way around orbital mechanics or
thermodynamics of radiating the waste heat from computation.

It would be interesting for a group of engineers to reverse what we
can see and determine if the distance to their star is optimized for
computation and the physical limits of materials.  I have not worked
it out, but the size of the object, even as far out as 7 AU is going
to cause some compression stress because the edges are above and below
the orbital plane.  There are dynamic ways to counter this if they are
needed.

Keith

On Tue, Dec 26, 2023 at 9:02 PM Jason Resch via extropy-chat
<extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>
>
>
> On Tue, Dec 26, 2023, 11:42 PM Keith Henson via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
>>
>> I wonder if AI might be less dangerous and less useful than it seems.
>> Intelligence is the application of knowledge to making decisions. The
>> LLM to date have depended on human knowledge for training. The point
>> here is that there may be a limit to knowledge. For example, all the
>> knowledge in the universe is not going to find a new element between
>> carbon and nitrogen.
>
>
> While existing AI is trained on human generated data, there's no limit to the amount of data an AI might choose to generate itself based on self-play, simulation, or exploration of the unlimited mathematical/platonic reality, or what you might call the realm of imagination.
>
> Left to its own devices, and provided unlimited computational resources, I think an AI could overcome an initial dearth of knowledge. The AIXI algorithm for instance, starts with zero knowledge but achieves perfect universal intelligence. Similarly, Google's AlphaZero was provided only the rules of chess, but through self-play quickly discovered and mastered all the common openings that took humans centuries to discover. And Koza's "invention machine" applies principles of evolution to come up with novel ideas.
>
> Jason
> _______________________________________________
> extropy-chat mailing list
> extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
> http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat