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By Katja Grace, 7 February 2015 Often, when people are asked ‘when will human-level AI arrive?’ they suggest that it is a meaningless or misleading term. I think they have a point. Or several, though probably

By Katja Grace, 2 February 2015 Penicillin was a hugely important discovery. But was it a discontinuity in the normal progression of research, or just an excellent discovery which followed a slightly less excellent discovery,

By Katja Grace, 21 January 2015 Once you have normal-human-level AI, how long does it take to get Einstein-level AI? We have seen that a common argument for ‘not long at all’ based on brain size does not

By Katja Grace, 18 January 2015 Here is a superficially plausible argument: the brains of the slowest humans are almost identical to those of the smartest humans. And thus—in the great space of possible intelligence—the ‘human-level’ band must be very narrow. Since

By Katja Grace, 12 January 2015 We recently wrote about Donald Michie’s survey on timelines to human-level AI. Michie’s survey is especially interesting because it was taken in 1972, which is three decades earlier than any other surveys we

By Katja Grace, 11 January 2015 Nuclear weapons were radically more powerful per pound than any previous bomb. Their appearance was a massive discontinuity in the long-run path of explosive progress, that we have lately discussed.

By Katja Grace, 10 January 2015 If you want to know when human-level AI will be developed, a natural approach is to ask someone who works on developing AI. You might however be put off by such predictions being regularly criticized

By Katja Grace, 9 January 2015 As we’ve discussed before, the advent of nuclear weapons was a striking technological discontinuity in the effectiveness of explosives. In 1940, no one had ever made an explosive twice as