I agree all of these things are possible and expect such capabilities to develop eventually. I also strongly agree with your premise that having more advanced AI can be a big geopolitical advantage, which means arms races are an issue. However, 5-20 years is not very long. It may be enough to have human level AGI, I don’t expect such an AGI will enable feeding an entire country on hydroponics in the event of global nuclear war.
In any case, that’s not even relevant to my point, which is that, while AI does enable nuclear bunkers, defending against ICBMs and hydroponics, in the short term it enables other things a lot more, including things that matter geopolitically. For a country with a large advantage in AI capabilities pursuing geopolitical goals, it seems a bad choice to use nuclear weapons or to take precautions against attack using such weapons and be better off in the aftermath.
Rather, I expect the main geopolitically relevant advantages of AI superiority to be economic and political power, which gives advantage both domestically (ability to organize) as well as for influencing geopolitical rivals. I think resorting to military power (let alone nuclear war) will not be the best use of AI superiority. Economic power would arise from increased productivity due to better coordination, as well as the ability to surveil the population. Political power abroad would arise from the economic power, as well as from collecting data about citizens and using it for predicting their sentiments, as well as propaganda. AI superiority strongly benefits from having meaningful data about the world and other actors, as well as good economy and stable supply chains. These things go out the window in a war. I also expect war to be a lot less politically viable than using the other advantages of AI, which matters.
5-20 years is to the date of the first general model that can be asked to do most robotics tasks and it has a decent chance to accomplish it zero shot in real world. And for the rest, the backend simulator learns from unexpected outcomes, the model trains on the updated simulator, and eventually succeeds in the real world as well.
It is also incremental, once the model can do a task at all in the real world, the simulator continues to update and in training the model continues to learn policies that perform well on the updated sim, thus increasing real world performance until it is close to the maximum possible performance given the goal heuristic and hardware limitations.
Once said model exists, exponential growth is inevitable but I am not claiming instant hydroponics or anything else.
Also note that the exponential growth may have a doubling time on the order of months to years, this is because of payback delays. (Every power generator has to pay for the energy used to build the generator first, with solar this is kinda slow, every factory has to first pay for the machine time used to build all the machines in the factory, etc)
So it only becomes crazy once the base value being doubled is large.
As for the rest: I agree, economic superiority is what you want in the immediate future. I am just saying “don’t build ASI or we nuke!” threats have to be dealt with and in the long term, “we refuse to build ASI and we feel safe with our nuclear arsenal” is a losing strategy.
I agree all of these things are possible and expect such capabilities to develop eventually. I also strongly agree with your premise that having more advanced AI can be a big geopolitical advantage, which means arms races are an issue. However, 5-20 years is not very long. It may be enough to have human level AGI, I don’t expect such an AGI will enable feeding an entire country on hydroponics in the event of global nuclear war.
In any case, that’s not even relevant to my point, which is that, while AI does enable nuclear bunkers, defending against ICBMs and hydroponics, in the short term it enables other things a lot more, including things that matter geopolitically. For a country with a large advantage in AI capabilities pursuing geopolitical goals, it seems a bad choice to use nuclear weapons or to take precautions against attack using such weapons and be better off in the aftermath.
Rather, I expect the main geopolitically relevant advantages of AI superiority to be economic and political power, which gives advantage both domestically (ability to organize) as well as for influencing geopolitical rivals. I think resorting to military power (let alone nuclear war) will not be the best use of AI superiority. Economic power would arise from increased productivity due to better coordination, as well as the ability to surveil the population. Political power abroad would arise from the economic power, as well as from collecting data about citizens and using it for predicting their sentiments, as well as propaganda. AI superiority strongly benefits from having meaningful data about the world and other actors, as well as good economy and stable supply chains. These things go out the window in a war. I also expect war to be a lot less politically viable than using the other advantages of AI, which matters.
5-20 years is to the date of the first general model that can be asked to do most robotics tasks and it has a decent chance to accomplish it zero shot in real world. And for the rest, the backend simulator learns from unexpected outcomes, the model trains on the updated simulator, and eventually succeeds in the real world as well.
It is also incremental, once the model can do a task at all in the real world, the simulator continues to update and in training the model continues to learn policies that perform well on the updated sim, thus increasing real world performance until it is close to the maximum possible performance given the goal heuristic and hardware limitations.
Once said model exists, exponential growth is inevitable but I am not claiming instant hydroponics or anything else.
Also note that the exponential growth may have a doubling time on the order of months to years, this is because of payback delays. (Every power generator has to pay for the energy used to build the generator first, with solar this is kinda slow, every factory has to first pay for the machine time used to build all the machines in the factory, etc)
So it only becomes crazy once the base value being doubled is large.
As for the rest: I agree, economic superiority is what you want in the immediate future. I am just saying “don’t build ASI or we nuke!” threats have to be dealt with and in the long term, “we refuse to build ASI and we feel safe with our nuclear arsenal” is a losing strategy.