This reminds me of the argument people make for the existence of life on other planets. “Sure, the chances of life on any given planet may be small, but with such a large number of planets, there’s gotta be life on one of them!”
But if there’s 700 quintillion planets, that fact alone tells you nothing. You’d also have to know that the chance of life occurring on any given planet is at least close to one in 700 quintillion, which we don’t in fact know and have no good way of estimating.
I feel your argument has a similar shape. “If we’re spending that much money on AI, then we’ve gotta reach AGI by then!” This is only true, of course, if the difficulty of achieving AGI is below a certain threshold, and we don’t know what that threshold is.
It’s a kind of relative evidence. If there are 700 quintillion planets, that makes it more likely there are aliens than if there were only a few thousand planets. But I’m still clueless as to what the actual probability is, only that it’s higher than it would have been otherwise. Same with AGI.
This reminds me of the argument people make for the existence of life on other planets. “Sure, the chances of life on any given planet may be small, but with such a large number of planets, there’s gotta be life on one of them!”
But if there’s 700 quintillion planets, that fact alone tells you nothing. You’d also have to know that the chance of life occurring on any given planet is at least close to one in 700 quintillion, which we don’t in fact know and have no good way of estimating.
I feel your argument has a similar shape. “If we’re spending that much money on AI, then we’ve gotta reach AGI by then!” This is only true, of course, if the difficulty of achieving AGI is below a certain threshold, and we don’t know what that threshold is.
It’s a kind of relative evidence. If there are 700 quintillion planets, that makes it more likely there are aliens than if there were only a few thousand planets. But I’m still clueless as to what the actual probability is, only that it’s higher than it would have been otherwise. Same with AGI.