I don’t know what level of cheap, quality robots you refer to. The quality of robotics needed to achieve transformative AI depends completely on the quality of your AI. For powerful AI it can be done with existing robot bodies, for weak AI it would need wildly superhuman bodies, at intermediate levels it can be done if humanoid robots cost millions of dollars each.
Interesting—this is perhaps another good crux between us.
My impression is that existing robot bodies are not good enough to do most human jobs, even if we had human-level AGI today. Human bodies self-repair, need infrequent maintenance, last decades, have multi-modal high bandwidth sensors built in, and are incredibly energy efficient.
One piece of evidence for this is how rare tele-operated robots are. There are plenty of generally intelligent humans around the world who would be happy to control robots for $1/hr, and yet they are not being employed to do so.
I didn’t mean to imply that human-level AGI could do human-level physical labor with existing robotics technology; I was using “powerful” to refer to a higher level of competence. I was using “intermediate levels” to refer to human-level AGI, and assuming it would need cheap human-like bodies.
Though mostly this seems like a digression. As you mention elsewhere, the bigger crux is that it seems to me like automating R&D would radically shorten timelines to AGI and be amongst the most important considerations in forecasting AGI.
(For this reason I don’t often think about AGI timelines, especially not for this relatively extreme definition. Instead I think about transformative AI, or AI that is as economically impactful as a simulated human for $X, or something along those lines.)
Interesting—this is perhaps another good crux between us.
My impression is that existing robot bodies are not good enough to do most human jobs, even if we had human-level AGI today. Human bodies self-repair, need infrequent maintenance, last decades, have multi-modal high bandwidth sensors built in, and are incredibly energy efficient.
One piece of evidence for this is how rare tele-operated robots are. There are plenty of generally intelligent humans around the world who would be happy to control robots for $1/hr, and yet they are not being employed to do so.
I didn’t mean to imply that human-level AGI could do human-level physical labor with existing robotics technology; I was using “powerful” to refer to a higher level of competence. I was using “intermediate levels” to refer to human-level AGI, and assuming it would need cheap human-like bodies.
Though mostly this seems like a digression. As you mention elsewhere, the bigger crux is that it seems to me like automating R&D would radically shorten timelines to AGI and be amongst the most important considerations in forecasting AGI.
(For this reason I don’t often think about AGI timelines, especially not for this relatively extreme definition. Instead I think about transformative AI, or AI that is as economically impactful as a simulated human for $X, or something along those lines.)