Your examples of tasks that are hard to approximate—irreducibly complex calculations like checksums; computational tasks that inherently require a lot of time or memory—seem little more than speed bumps on the road to surpassing humanity. An AI can do such calculations the normal way if it really needs to carry them out; it can imitate the appearance of such calculations if it doesn’t need to do so; and meanwhile it can use its power to develop superhuman problem-solving heuristics, to surpass us in all other areas…
To clarify, I’m not arguing that AI can’t surpass humanity, only that there are certain tasks for which DNNs are the wrong tool and a non-AI approach is and possibly always will be preferred.
An AI can do such calculations the normal way if it really needs to carry them out
This is a recapitulation of my key claim: that any future asymptotically powerful A(G)I (and even some current ChatGPT + agent services) will have non-AI subsystems for tasks where precision or scalability is more easily obtained by non-AI means, and that there will probably always be some such tasks.
Your examples of tasks that are hard to approximate—irreducibly complex calculations like checksums; computational tasks that inherently require a lot of time or memory—seem little more than speed bumps on the road to surpassing humanity. An AI can do such calculations the normal way if it really needs to carry them out; it can imitate the appearance of such calculations if it doesn’t need to do so; and meanwhile it can use its power to develop superhuman problem-solving heuristics, to surpass us in all other areas…
Agreed, largely.
To clarify, I’m not arguing that AI can’t surpass humanity, only that there are certain tasks for which DNNs are the wrong tool and a non-AI approach is and possibly always will be preferred.
This is a recapitulation of my key claim: that any future asymptotically powerful A(G)I (and even some current ChatGPT + agent services) will have non-AI subsystems for tasks where precision or scalability is more easily obtained by non-AI means, and that there will probably always be some such tasks.