Submitted by Impressive-Injury-91 t3_1118hkt in singularity
SoylentRox t1_j8eh4tu wrote
Reply to comment by genericrich in Anthropic's Jack Clark on AI progress by Impressive-Injury-91
My point is that scale matters. A 3d multiplayer game was "known" to be possible in the 1950s. They had mostly offline rendered graphics. They had computer networks. There was nothing in the idea that couldn't be done, but in practice it was nearly completely impossible. The only thing remotely similar cost more than the entire manhattan project and they were playing that 3d game in real life. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment
If you enthused about future game consoles in the 1950s, you'd get blown off. Similarly, we have heard about the possibility of AI about that long - and suddenly boom, the dialogue of HAL 9000 for instance is actually quite straightforward and we could duplicate EXACTLY the functions of that AI right now, no problem. Just take a transformer network, add some stream control characters to send commands to ship systems, add a summary of the ship's system status to the memory it sees each frame. Easy. (note this would be dangerous and unreliable...just like the movie)
Also note that in the the 1950s there was no guarantee the number of vacuum tubes you would need to support a 3d game (hundreds of millions) would EVER be cheap enough to allow ordinary consumers to play them. The transistor had not been invented.
Humans for decades thought an AGI might take centuries of programming effort.
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