Folks, heres a list of things not happening by 2030 that you can take to the bank:
-AGI or any AI at all
-Autonomous vehicles deployed generally
-Autonomous robots of any kind
-datacenters in space
All of these technologies currently rely on regression to work. The first 3 use regression to compute predictions. The last one relies on the regression compute to be practical. All automation up until this point more or less relies on regression. It is incremental, not revolutionary, and IT DOESN’T SCALE. We are seeing this now, as models have now consumed all of the data on the planet and still can’t quite do anything correctly. In small domains with lots of data, it can be practical. Nearly all automation we have today leans on small domains to remain tractable. Once the domain expands, the problem blows up. Variance is the death of regression, data be damned. And the future is more variance than trend.
Humans excel because they are not statistical. They are superstitious. Adaption is quick, but leaves many data points unexplained. Most people who are extremely productive go their whole lives strongly believing a whole host of things that are not true. It is precisely our lack of statistical rigor that makes us effective.
So when you try to recreate human superstition with statistics, compute will blow up and edge cases will snuff it out in the night.
It is a certainty that regressive methods are a dead end. A certainty. It is not practical to require 10,000 humans worth of energy to recreate 1 human output.
Now could someone discover how the mind works and the methods it uses? Absolutely. But no one is looking for it because they are getting paid millions a year to bark up another tree. And once discovered, then a roadmap must be built to get us to systems that can perform it. We must design new chips, develop new material systems, new compute structures, how to interface them with conventional computing, and on and on and on. It’s a decade job once the roadmap has been developed. We don’t even know where to start!
The sooner we abandon the bankrupt religious belief that AI will save us, the better we will be. Because every day we ignore reality is another day for our problems to metastasize.
AI will not solve our problems. Robots will not solve our problems. We must solve our problems ourselves. And we could start building a roadmap for that today.