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Will the End of Moore's Law Halt AI Progress? (mindmatters.ai)
johnnyb (Slashdot reader #4,816) writes:
Kurzweil's conception of "The Singularity" has been at the forefront of the media conception of artificial intelligence for many years now. But how close is that to reality? Will AI's be able to design ever-more-powerful AIs? Eric Holloway suggests that the power of AI has been fueled by Moore's law more than AI technology itself, and therefore hitting Moore's Wall will bring AI expansion to a fast halt.
Holloway calls that halt "peak AI...the point where a return on the investment in AI improvement is not worthwhile." He argues that humanity will reach that point, "perhaps soon...."
"So, returning to our original question, whether there is a path to Kurzweil's Singularity, we must conclude from our analysis that no such path exists and that unlimited self-improving AI is impossible."
Holloway calls that halt "peak AI...the point where a return on the investment in AI improvement is not worthwhile." He argues that humanity will reach that point, "perhaps soon...."
"So, returning to our original question, whether there is a path to Kurzweil's Singularity, we must conclude from our analysis that no such path exists and that unlimited self-improving AI is impossible."
Much of recent AI progress has come from the awesome amount of cheap computing power available.
That's not going to change! As today's bleeding edge silicon processes evolve, they will get faster and cheaper (both in cost and energy consumption), if not smaller.
Much of AI is inherently parallel: So long as more CPUs and GPUs can be added, larger problems will be solved faster.
We are still in the first two generations of custom hardware for AI. That trend will continue and accelerate as new architectures and algorithms arrive.
I'd say there are at least three full "Moore's Law" generations coming for AI, very likely more. But transistors alone won't be driving it. Fortunately, there are lots of other factors that will.
Interesting opinion, considering many great scientific contributions and advancements throughout the ages have come (and still come) from people who were (or are) very religious. And many of those people attribute their discoveries at least partly to divine inspiration, realizing that despite all the hard work, study, experimentation, and preparation on their part, there is still sometimes the feeling of a sudden flow of knowledge or creativity from an external source, resulting in ideas that they feel they would not have come up with on their own.
Just curious... what are YOUR valuable contributions to science?