By saying this aren’t you assuming that human civilization will last long enough to get there?
Look at the timeline of other species on this planet. Vast numbers of them are long extinct. They never evolved intelligence to our level. Only we did. Yet we know our intelligence is quite limited.
What took biology billions of years we’re attempting to do in a few generations (the project for AI began in the 1950s). Meanwhile the amount of non-renewable energy resources we’re consuming has hit exponential takeoff. Our political systems are straining and stretching to the breaking point.
And of course progress towards AI has not been steady with the project. There was an initial burst of success in the ‘50s followed by a long AI winter when researchers got stuck in a local maximum. It’s not at all clear to me that we haven’t entered a new local maximum with LLMs.
Do we even have a few more generations left to work on this?
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 day ago
I’m talking about AI development broadly, not just LLMs.
I also listed human extinction as one of the two possible scenarios in which we never reach AGI, the other being that there’s something unique about biological brains that cannot be replicated artificially.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 day ago
We could witness a collapse in our high tech civilization that effectively ends AI research without necessarily leading to extinction. Think of a global warming supercharged Mad Max post-apocalyptic future. People still survive but the population has crashed and there’s a lot of fighting for survival and scavenging among the ruins of civilization.
There’s gotta be countless other variations on this theme. Global dystopian techno-feudalism perhaps?
Free_Opinions@feddit.uk 1 day ago
Sure, but that’s still just a speedbump. In a few hundred or thousand years the civilization would rebound and we’d continue from where we left.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 day ago
I don’t think there’s any guarantee that civilization would rebound. Fossil fuels were a one-shot deal in the geological history of the planet. For all of our efforts to build a sustainable future with renewable energy, fossil fuels remain critical for a lot of non-energy uses: food production (fertilizers), plastics, steel, and even cements for construction.
Another major issue is critical minerals for building renewable energy infrastructure. These minerals are being mined at an incredible rate, processed and turned into technology (think circuit boards full of components), aging out, and ending up as e-waste. Unfortunately our e-waste recycling infrastructure is a total nightmare involving the shipping of this stuff across the ocean to 3rd world countries where it gets picked over, scavenged for valuables, and the rest turned into toxic landfill.
All of that technology lifecycle creates huge amounts of toxic pollution and consumes huge amounts of fossil fuels (in particular for the mining, processing, and shipping). So in fact without fossil fuels we don’t even know how to build any technology, let alone renewable energy.