Glad to see that the team is taking a pragmatic safety-first approach here, as well as towards the near-term economical realities of funding a very expensive project to ensure the fastest possible progress.
In the early days of OpenAI, my thoughts were that the project had good intentions, but a misguided focus. The last year has changed that, though. They absolutely seem to be on the right track. Very excited to see their progress over the next years.
No one knows how far off true AGI is, just like no one in 1940 (or 1910) knew how far off fission weapons were.
EDIT: I quite liked this article from a few years back [0], and the fission weapon prediction example is stolen from there.
Our study of (automated) intelligence is based on science too.
> A computer ... will never be able to think by itself.
Turing wrote an entire paper about this (Computing Machinery and Intelligence), where he rephrases your statement (because he finds it to be meaningless) and devises a test to answer it. He also directly attacks your phrasing of "but it will never":
> I believe they are mostly founded on the principle of scientific induction. A man has seen thousands of machines in his lifetime. From what he sees of them he draws a number of general conclusions. They are ugly, each is designed for a very limited purpose, when required for a minutely different purpose they are useless, the variety of behaviour of any one of them is very small, etc., etc. Naturally he concludes that these are necessary properties of machines in general.
> A better variant of the objection says that a machine can never "take us by surprise." This statement is a more direct challenge and can be met directly. Machines take me by surprise with great frequency. This is largely because I do not do sufficient calculation to decide what to expect them to do, or rather because, although I do a calculation, I do it in a hurried, slipshod fashion, taking risks.
"If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and as machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more and more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machine off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide."
A computer being able to simulate a brain that thinks for itself is the logical extrapolation of current brain-simulation efforts. Many people think there are far less computationally intensive ways to make an AI, but "physics sim of a human brain" is a good thought experiment.
Unless you think there's something magic about human brains? Using "magic" here to mean incomprehensible, unobservable, and incomputable.
