You say “absolutely 0 innovation in AI” at the top but then say “no more ‘breakthroughs’ in AI—I’m not counting what an expert in 2021 would consider an obvious or incremental improvement or application” at the bottom. Even leaving aside that those two quotes are not equivalent, I think there’s a lot of scope for disagreement and confusion here.
Any company or research group trying to do anything new with ML—industrial robotics, for example—will immediately discover that it doesn’t work on the first try, so then they work at it, and probably have clever ideas along the way, and publish or patent them, and maybe eventually they get it to work, or maybe not.
Is that “absolutely 0 innovation”? No. Is that “obvious”? Maybe the application is “obvious”, or maybe not, but the steps to get it to work are not obvious. Is that “incremental improvement”? Maybe, maybe not. Is it a “breakthrough”? Well, it depends on what “breakthrough” means. In 100 years, no one will be telling stories of how heroic industrial researcher Esme figured out how to get the drone to avoid hitting branches. But on the other hand, maybe lots of people before Esme were trying to get the drone to not hit branches, and they all failed until Esme succeeded.
If “absolutely 0 innovation” is to be taken literally, well, we don’t have industrial robotics, and we don’t have human-level movie scripts, etc., and we’re not going to get them without innovation. If you mean something like “soon” or “by default”, that’s a different question.
In any case, my answer is that, however transformative the bullet points you list would be, they’re not nearly as transformative as “an AI that can do literally every aspect of my job, and yours, but better and cheaper”. That’s what IJ Good called “the last invention that man need ever make”—because the AI can take the initiative to come up with all future inventions, found all future companies, discover all future scientific truths, etc. etc. Think “very, very, very transformative”. And I do think that, to get there, we need things that most people would call “breakthroughs”, even if they have some continuity with existing ideas.
You say “absolutely 0 innovation in AI” at the top but then say “no more ‘breakthroughs’ in AI—I’m not counting what an expert in 2021 would consider an obvious or incremental improvement or application” at the bottom. Even leaving aside that those two quotes are not equivalent, I think there’s a lot of scope for disagreement and confusion here.
Any company or research group trying to do anything new with ML—industrial robotics, for example—will immediately discover that it doesn’t work on the first try, so then they work at it, and probably have clever ideas along the way, and publish or patent them, and maybe eventually they get it to work, or maybe not.
Is that “absolutely 0 innovation”? No. Is that “obvious”? Maybe the application is “obvious”, or maybe not, but the steps to get it to work are not obvious. Is that “incremental improvement”? Maybe, maybe not. Is it a “breakthrough”? Well, it depends on what “breakthrough” means. In 100 years, no one will be telling stories of how heroic industrial researcher Esme figured out how to get the drone to avoid hitting branches. But on the other hand, maybe lots of people before Esme were trying to get the drone to not hit branches, and they all failed until Esme succeeded.
If “absolutely 0 innovation” is to be taken literally, well, we don’t have industrial robotics, and we don’t have human-level movie scripts, etc., and we’re not going to get them without innovation. If you mean something like “soon” or “by default”, that’s a different question.
In any case, my answer is that, however transformative the bullet points you list would be, they’re not nearly as transformative as “an AI that can do literally every aspect of my job, and yours, but better and cheaper”. That’s what IJ Good called “the last invention that man need ever make”—because the AI can take the initiative to come up with all future inventions, found all future companies, discover all future scientific truths, etc. etc. Think “very, very, very transformative”. And I do think that, to get there, we need things that most people would call “breakthroughs”, even if they have some continuity with existing ideas.