“So far as I can presently estimate, now that we’ve had AlphaGo and a couple of other maybe/maybe-not shots across the bow, and seen a huge explosion of effort invested into machine learning and an enormous flood of papers, we are probably going to occupy our present epistemic state until very near the end.

“[…I]t’s hard to guess how many further insights are needed for AGI, or how long it will take to reach those insights. After the next breakthrough, we still won’t know how many more breakthroughs are needed, leaving us in pretty much the same epistemic state as before. […] You can either act despite that, or not act. Not act until it’s too late to help much, in the best case; not act at all until after it’s essentially over, in the average case.”

Read more in a new blog post by Eliezer Yudkowsky: “There’s No Fire Alarm for Artificial General Intelligence.” (Discussion on LessWrong 2.0, Hacker News.)

Research updates

General updates

News and links