New report examines how AI might affect urban life
These types of reports seem overly conservative.  Unless you think there is something magic about human or animal brains (many people still do believe this sort of thing or think there is some quantum (read &#x27;magic&#x27;) feature) then you have to anticipate a strong possibility that we will be able to emulate most of human capabilities and traits with hardware.<p>When we get to that point, it is very likely we will be able to improve the performance of these AIs by speeding them up or interconnecting them, etc.  So another likely possibility is that these AIs could be twice as smart as us. Many speculate thousands of times smarter, but I don&#x27;t think there is any reason to assume that is feasible -- and twice as smart as us is significant enough.<p>So these AIs could become much smarter then us and because they are not constrained by biology could take any type of physical form.<p>I think that if you are trying to speculate cautiously then you should consider this very similar to an alien invasion.  The one advantage we have is that we will be training&#x2F;programming the first generations of these things, so we had better get that right.  But after they become say twice as smart, normal humans probably won&#x27;t have as much sway over them anymore.<p>I think that when you look at all of the amazing abilities from the last few years from Watson winning at Jeopardy, Deep Dream, Deep Mind with WaveNet speaking and arcade game learning, Atlas walking and picking up boxes, winning at Go, etc. -- these are all amazing and people are very serious about pursuing general AI again.  So how do we know how many more fundamental breakthroughs are actually required to get to our truly general humanlike intelligence?  Are we even sure that we don&#x27;t have the techniques already and just need to combine them in a certain way?<p>So my way of thinking is that to speculate conservatively, guess that there may be two major research breakthroughs required on the same order as deep learning.  If we had not seen such an increase in AGI research then that would sort of console me.  But because AGI funding has increased and the belief is back that these types of goals are possible, it seems like we should not assume that it will take many decades to achieve these breakthroughs (if we actually need more breakthroughs).  How do we know that one or two of the dozens (hundreds? thousands?) of literal geniuses with an adequate background who are working in this area will not come up with some new major breakthroughs in the next two years or five years or eight?<p>So yes my personal opinion is that we should start planning for an &#x27;alien invasion&#x27; of superintelligent AGI which if we are being cautious could pretty much come at any time now, and certainly it might happen before 2030.