I don’t think there is an “AGI textbook” any more than there is an “industrialization textbook.” There are lots of books about general principles and useful kinds of machines. That said, if I had to make wild guesses about roughly what that future understanding would look like:
There is a recognizable concept of “learning” meaning something like “search for policies that perform well in past or simulated situations.” That plays a large role, comparably important to planning or Bayesian inference. Logical induction is likely an elaboration of Bayesian inference that receives relatively little airtime except in specialized discussions.
This one is tougher given that I don’t know what “the textbook” is. And I guess in the story all other humans are magically disappeared? If I was stuck with a single AWS cluster from 2022 and given unlimited time, I’d wildly guess that it would take me something between 1e4 and 1e8 years to create an autopoetic AI that obsoleted my own contributions (mostly because serial time is extremely valuable and I have a lot of compute). Writing the textbook does not seem like very much work after having done the deed?
I’d roughly guess big sections on learning, inference, planning, alignment, and clever algorithms for all of the above. I’d guess maybe 50% of content is smart versions of stuff we know now and 50% is stuff we didn’t figure out at the time, but it depends a lot on how you define this textbook.
I don’t think there is an “AGI textbook” any more than there is an “industrialization textbook.” There are lots of books about general principles and useful kinds of machines. That said, if I had to make wild guesses about roughly what that future understanding would look like:
There is a recognizable concept of “learning” meaning something like “search for policies that perform well in past or simulated situations.” That plays a large role, comparably important to planning or Bayesian inference. Logical induction is likely an elaboration of Bayesian inference that receives relatively little airtime except in specialized discussions.
This one is tougher given that I don’t know what “the textbook” is. And I guess in the story all other humans are magically disappeared? If I was stuck with a single AWS cluster from 2022 and given unlimited time, I’d wildly guess that it would take me something between 1e4 and 1e8 years to create an autopoetic AI that obsoleted my own contributions (mostly because serial time is extremely valuable and I have a lot of compute). Writing the textbook does not seem like very much work after having done the deed?
I’d roughly guess big sections on learning, inference, planning, alignment, and clever algorithms for all of the above. I’d guess maybe 50% of content is smart versions of stuff we know now and 50% is stuff we didn’t figure out at the time, but it depends a lot on how you define this textbook.