[rocho]

But that does not prove anything. We don't know where we are on the AI-power scale currently. "Superintelligence", whatever that means, could be 1 year or 1000 years away at our current progress, and we wouldn't know until we reach it.

[handoflixue]

50 years ago we could rather confidently say that "Superintelligence" was absolutely not happening next year, and was realistically decades ago. If we can say "it could be next year", then things have changed radically and we're clearly a lot closer - even if we still don't know how far we have to go.

A thousand years ago we hadn't invented electricity, democracy, or science. I really don't think we're a thousand years away from AI. If intelligence is really that hard to build, I'd take it as proof that someone else must have created us humans.

[110]

Umm, customary, tongue-in-cheek reference to McCarthy's proposal for a 10 person research team to solve AI in 2 months (over the Summers)[1]. This was ~70 years ago :)

Not saying we're in necessarily the same situation. But it remains difficult to evaluate effort required for actual progress.

[1]: https://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/dartmouth/dartmo...