@aeonofdiscord I don't think it's a matter of throwing more computers at the problem either, I think it's a matter of inventing better Algorithms - and that doesn't make me feel any better at all. Inventing better algorithms is not a problem, we do that pretty steadily. And the more algorithms we invent, the better tools we have, and the more wealth we have, and the more people go into AI research... :/

@Angle right, but I don't think you can get SAI out of the kind of incremental progress that computer science normally makes. you'd have to have a revolution in usable quantum processors or prove P=NP or something, at which point the whole field basically goes out the window anyway. but there's no timescale for that kind of thing

honestly I think biotech has a better shot a building intelligent agents, if only because it has a model to work from

@aeonofdiscord Incremental progress? I was under the impression that the standard for computer science was exponential progress, in everything from transistors to polygon counts. I'm not saying it's certain, but I think a fairly steady stream of "Yeah that was impossible last year but now it's easy" is to be expected. :/

@Angle it's definitely true that the semiconductor industry got very good at cramming a lot of transistors onto a die, very quickly, and that drove expansion in a whole lot of areas.

software...hasn't really improved at the same rate. afaik most of the foundational CS stuff was done in the 50s-70s; people develop new algorithms all the time, but they're mostly optimisations and specialisations of already-known stuff

@aeonofdiscord I mean, that's technically true, but what matters is less when something was invented or discovered, and more when it was put to use. And thats been happening at an exponential rate.