AIs plotted in Hardware - Software space

Was thinking a few years ago about the prospects of someone developing a strong AI in the near future, and it occurred to me that if they got close by writing sophisticated software, then they could quickly get the rest of the way by throwing money at it: buying more hardware.

This presumed that hardware and software capabilities could trade off against each other. To test this idea, I reached out for a couple of examples, and found one in chess, and another from some friends in factoring algorithms.

I plotted various kinds of tasks in Hardware-Software space, and proposed that the speed of those tasks remained constant along diagonal iso-lines, and was pleased to see how well this bore out. Note that I conveniently leave off units from my horizontal axis, so you'll have to just pretend that there is some way of quantifying this, and for the moment humor me by just accepting that it increases monotonically to the right.

For the factoring task, a 1977 Apple II running a sophisticated 2007-era algorithm had roughly equivalent performance to a 1977 algorithm running on two of IBM & Livermore's ground-vibrating behemoths known as BlueGene/Ls, the fastest computer in the world in 2007.

Similarly story with two chess-playing computers, Deep Blue and Deep Fritz, both of which had about equivalent performance to a human grandmaster.

What I conclude for the case of the strong AI project is that the developers will face a choice once they achieve an AGI of sufficient power, say, powerful enough to reach the "Turing Test" iso-line. I assume they will do so using some kind of large cluster running some exquisitely brilliant software.

They could then go the direction I call "democratize", and refine the software so that people all over the world could instantiate these AGIs and start solving all kinds of hard problems, advance AI research, keep people company, etc.

Or...they could take an alternate path that I call "Push to Seed", on which they take in massive funding, and expand their hardware enough that the intelligence increases its power to the Seed AI level. This is the level at which the AI would be capable of redesigning itself for increased performance, which could then design for even more performance, etc. Whoever possesses this AI will have the worlds most powerful tool -- will they use it for good or ill? That probably depends on who provides that massive funding.

Food for thought...

What is the shape of your Object-Relationship curve?

I recently moved, and so have been thinking about objects. Which to keep, which to toss, which to buy for the new place, etc. I would ask my friends, but I know that I'd get conflicting answers. Some of my friends are concerned with function über alles, while others are obsessed primarily with how things look. This got me to thinking about form vs. function -- and how do I feel about them?

I plotted all possible objects in form-function space and gave them names:

Of course! All I have to do is get only elegant things, and I'll be set. Unfortunately, some are not available and others are too expensive. I am going to have to learn to deal with some trade offs. How are these properties related? I am sure that more of one can make up for less of the other, so here I plot a simplistic way of showing the merit of a given object across form-function space, by drawing iso-lines of what I'll call and object's Personal Value for now:

Assuming those iso-lines describe how I deal with objects, I wonder how I could represent my friends and family members? I think they would be slanted at different angles, like this:

It's very helpful to have a way to categorize my friends; I was wondering what to call all those categories that Facebook allows me to create.

I'll bet some people have more distance between the pairs of lines. I'll call that distance a person's Object Hysteresis. Some people will hang onto that backpack for years even though it's not optimal for them anymore, while others will toss it as soon as they discover that and head straight to REI. Still others (minimalists) will toss it, but wait until they find a replacement with much, much higher Object Value, which could take years.

What do your Object-Relationship curves look like in Form-Function space?

hello world

i will post some thoughts here

Hype Chasm

I noticed two of my favorite ways of looking at technology markets, the Gartner Hype Cycle and Geoffrey Moore's Technology Adoption Life Cycle are different ways of looking at the same thing. When distinct concepts collapse into each other, I get excited, so I made this diagram to show what I mean:

Computing History Plotted in Code-Data Space

Where the code/application is driven from, and where the data is kept have both shifted around as computing has evolved. Here is one way of looking at that:

It would seem that the PC was a temporary detour!

Evolution of Elitism

How will my family and I fare in the globalizing market for intellectual labor? Reflecting on this, I’ll try dividing history into 3 stages:

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100th millennium BCE: Intelligence defines the species:
Against a backdrop in which physical attributes (like strength and food efficiency) were the primary determinants of survival, humans differentiated themselves by being smarter than other primates.

Intervening period: Intelligence affects local status:
Intelligence, not just lineage, affects placement within local society/village (leader/smithy/engineer vs. farmer/miner/driver, etc.) -- increasingly so in the 20th century, as intellectual labor becomes a significant fraction of all work done.

2000 CE+: Intelligence affects global status:
Intellectual labor becomes geographically fungible thru networking and software technology. Mental abilities now define placement within the entire global socioeconomic hierarchy. Whole countries will rise and fall based on how thoughtfully they work. Individuals now compete in an order-of-magnitude-larger labor market.

Thus if you are of medium abilities in a country that has historically been elite for independent reasons (e.g. USA), you may find your economic status reset to that of someone of equivalent abilities within the global pool, significantly reducing your economic position. For instance, if you presently make $50k/year doing medium-skilled knowledge work in the usa, you may soon find yourself making $5k/year for the same work.

Similarly, if you have been among the elite-most 3 people in your field in Germany, a country of 82 million people, you may soon be only 1 in 250 people among the globe's 6,800 million, especially as the education gap in the between the West and everyone else continues to close.

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What does this mean for my family? I should encourage/support my family members to either (1) be fulfilled providing locally-bound physical-labor-based services, or (2) to be globally preeminent in some increasingly useful area of intellectual work -- with the latter option being my preference (based on lifelong biases), despite it's possibly being the riskiest of the two. This may be mean more than just scoring high on standardized tests (which millions can do), but rather nurturing special and uniquely creative viewpoint and skills.