From: Doug Jones (random@qnet.com)
Date: Wed Jun 16 1999 - 10:34:42 MDT
By the way, Eliezer, I have a question/quibble/objection to your
doubled doubling description of the singularity: it ignores hardware
development cycles. Certainly a fully functional AI could improve
its own software, but the runaway would be damped by the hardware
design and fabrication process- smarter code also needs faster
hardware to run at faster subjective speed.
Granted, an advanced AI could also be a wizard chip designer,
capable of pushing out a new design in a fraction of the current
time, but chip compilers run no faster for a design generated by an
AI than for one generated by humans with good design tools (my boss,
Jeff Greason, has war stories of sleeping under his desk while
monitoring the compilation of the Pentium chip layout).
Given that wafer fab processes, even for prototype runs, take
several weeks for the wafers to wend their way through, a near-term
AI driven singularity would likely double no faster than once a
month. True, this is about 18 times faster than Moore's law, but it
would make the singularity a bit less daunting, and allow more human
preparation and adjustment during the process.
Of course, really clever AIs would seek to automate the entire
fabrication process, but dramatic decreases in fab latency would
likely require a whole new fab- with human labor in the loop keeping
the doubling time long.
Eliezer S. Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> I think some people were extremely skeptical of their metrics -
> something along the lines of "You're counting each transistor as a
> floating-point operation."
-- Doug Jones, Rocket Plumber Rotary Rocket Company
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