I thiiiiink this book makes some important mistakes, judging from a quick glance.
So, for instance—he asks how much power the regular car-user consumes. He says that energy use per day per person is distance travelled per day, over distance per unit of fuel, times energy per unit of fuel. He plugs in numbers, gets 40 kWh / day / person. Significantly, he says that a liter of petrol (dude seems British) has about 10 kWh in it (which Google seems to confirm) and that a typical car gets 12 km / liter (ok, seems fair, haven’t double-checked, whatever). So his figure of 40 kWh / day / person, implicitly involves a car gets 12 km / 10 kWh, or 1.2 km/kWh.
And later he uses these numbers, together with numbers that purport to show that if we covered all English roofs with solar panels you only get 5 kWh / day / person, leaving us with a significant shortfall of the 40 kWh / day / person. (http://www.withouthotair.com/c6/page_39.shtml)
But, um, here’s the problem. Electric motors are waaaay more efficient than internal combustion. Wikipedia informs me that a Model S gets about 3 miles per kWh, according to the EPA, which converts to about 4.8 km / kWh. (This isn’t a floor by any means. Model 3 looks like it is better, although not by a ground-breaking amount. And this is why electric cars have stupid-sounding [to me] numbers applied to them like “100 miles per gallon of gas equivalent”.) So, anyhow, approximately 4x more efficient, which leaves us with notably smaller shortfall, although one that still means that solar panels are insufficient for our total energy needs for driving. Ah well, haven’t looked into the numbers of how hard it is to get sufficient solar power. 4x off isn’t thaaaaat bad for a Fermi estimate, I guess.
Anyhow, I might have made elementary mistakes in the above. The only reason I bothered with this comment was that I saw his figures that seemed to assume we’d require the same total energy for our electric cars as for our petrol ones, and I was like “That seems wwaaaaaaay” off. And even if I hadn’t done the math I’d still have that overall impression.
My overall impression looking at this is still more or less summed up by what Francois Chollet said a bit ago.
Some of the stuff Deepmind talks about a lot—so, for instance, the AlphaLeague—seems like a clever technique simply designed to ensure that you have a sufficiently dense sampling of the space, which would normally not occur in a game with unstable equilibria. And this seems to me more like “clever technique applicable to domain where we can generate infinite data through self-play” than “stepping stone on way to AGI.”
That being said, I haven’t yet read through all the papers in the blog postl, and I’d be curious what of them people think might be / definitely are potential steps towards actually engineering intelligence.