Comment Re:Credential-itis (Score 1) 531
I'm not sure 'temptation' is the position I'd choose. There is a reason why real A.I. is always 10 to 20 years away.
A.I. is competing with an organism that has evolved, over millions of years, to be very efficient at energy utilization. The organic brain needs to be energy efficient because animals may not find food continuously for long periods of time.
We have designed machines, to date, assuming that energy input will always be plentiful and ubiquitously available. If you add up the calories necessary to make a computer that could perform all the simultaneous tasks that a society of human beings carry out you end up with a massive power supply. A power supply too big to carry.
The amount of energy required to have real, self portable, A.I.; A.I. at the same level as human intelligence; using machinery is impossible from the perspective of energy. If you consider 'social' robots, free of wires, self guided, and behaviourally/physically autonomous, then you're talking about tons of equipment and power supply. To have a society of these things would consume more power than we could produce.
In short, the A.I. singularity with current technology would either be trapped in a network forever, or would be so large and consumptive that it would die right away from lack of energy if disconnected from the grid.
Don't just take it from me as fact. Work out how much energy a single purpose A.I. uses in watts per day, and then multiply it up based on how much more a single human being can do simultaneously by comparison. A human burns about 2400 calories on a good day. That's about ten thousand Watt seconds of energy. A desktop computer; 200 Watts per hour. Super computers are using hundreds of Tesla GPU cards at 225 Watts each to create what we currently call simple A.I..
I have no worries of true autonomous A.I. being anything other than another 20 years away for a very long time.