[ExI] Wired article on AI risk

[Eugen Leitl]

On Tue, May 29, 2012 at 05:18:05PM -0600, Kelly Anderson wrote:

> > My understanding is exactly that. A Power Macintosh could emulate an Intel
> > PC because given unlimited time and unlimited memory anything that is a
> > "universal computer" can emulate any system at all - even though this may be
> > true for quantum processors only in theory.

QC is not a generic architecture. It only achieves a speedup
for a small class of massively parallel algorithms.
 
> Let's not get into the quantum processors, that will just make my
> brain hurt. Of course, it's the case because quantum computers exist
> only in theory.

No, they exist in practice. It's just that they're useless, unless
they can be made to scale. Unlike at the beginning we do have solid
state RT qubits now. Whether this scaling ever happens is not obvious.
My hunch is that something bad will happen when you attempt to scale.
Something involving exponential amounts of energy (maintaining
coherence in an expanding warm plasma where once upon a time used
to be your solid state quibits is probably quite difficult) or
quantum correction having limits.