I don't think GP means "magic smoke" as in actual magic, some new physics. It's more like we just have few potential building blocks (e.g. pattern matching), but we're not sure if we have all of them, and we definitely don't know how to connect them together to create sentience.
(And no, more GPUs running faster DNNs doesn't seem like an answer.)
I thought the idea was to create an AI that was way smarter than a human? I mean, if you just have human level AI, that's not gonna cause the singularity unless there aren't any physical limits preventing it from scaling itself up, and scaling itself up a lot
A group of persons can do many more than a person can do, even with relatively low bandwidth interconnections (speech, text, diagrams, gestures), coordination problems, and economics that has to waste resources on members' incentives (it's not wasted by majority opinion of the said members, of course).
Even in off-chance that you can't improve individual AIs beyond top humans, AI community can be way more intelligent and efficient than humanity, as it is possible to remove the limitations I wrote above. AI society can function as very efficient war economy. War economy shows that even humans can be persuaded/indoctrinated/brought up/whatever to set aside their inessential needs and work for common goal. And AIs will be necessarily more malleable.
So I can't see the idea that AI will be safe by default other than wishful thinking.
>So I can't see the idea that AI will be safe by default other than wishful thinking.
I... don't think anyone is arguing that AI is safe in any way? I mean, the pattern matching tools we call AI now are already deployed in very dangerous weapons.
My point is not that AI is going to be safe and warm and fuzzy, or even that it won't be an existential threat. My point is that we're already facing several existential threats that don't require additional technological development to destroy society, and because the existing threats don't require postulating entirely new classes of compute machinery, we should probably focus on them first.
There are still enough nuclear weapons in the world for a global war to end society and most of us. A conflict like we saw in the first half of the 20th century using modern weapons would kill nearly all of us, and we are seeing a global resurgence of early 20th century political ideas. I think this is the biggest danger to the continuation of humanity right now.
We haven't killed ourselves yet... but the danger is still there. we still have apocalyptic weapons aimed and ready to go at a moment's notice. We still face the danger of those weapons becoming cheaper and easier to produce as we advance industrially.
(And no, more GPUs running faster DNNs doesn't seem like an answer.)