Advanced AI doesn’t solve future threats---we have the tech, but it’s the application that’s lacking

Brian Wang, "Artificial General Intelligence Limitations," NextBigFuture, 6-8-2021, https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2021/06/artificial-general-intelligence-limitations.html

What is Hard and What is Surprisingly Easy

Many people talk about needing AGI or a technological singularity to solve the major problems that we have today. The major problems that people identify are generally all solvable with the proper application of current technology.

Feeding everyone, even with a much larger population. China is spending about $100 billion to build greenhouses that will grow food ten to twenty times more efficiently than outdoor farming. This would also use vastly less water and this has been proven at national scale with simpler plastic sheeting greenhouses in China and with farming in the Netherlands. $500 billion using technology originally created hundreds of years ago can enable us to feed 20 times as many people. The greenhouse farms would also be immune to any forecasted climate changes over the next 500 years.

Air pollution. Air pollution is slowly getting better. All cars and trucks will be electrified and fossil fuel energy is being eliminated. This process just takes about 50 years to fully scale.

De-carbonize the atmosphere. This is again a solvable problem without super technology. Fast growth tree species can grow in ten years or less and each tree can hold ten tons of carbon in its wood. If we massively reduce the land used for farming crops with greehouses, we can use more land for growing trees. The trees can be harvested and the wood holds the carbon until the wood decays. If the heavy machinery for cutting and processing the wood is made electric we can make a relatively low cost, low pollution system for removing carbon from the atmosphere at scale.

Iteratively improving the intelligence of civilization and continually accelerating the rate of improvement is more difficult. It would be possible for everyone to learn the methods and management of Tesla and SpaceX. Factories could be redesigned and rebuilt on a two to four year cycles and could even reach one year cycles of re-invention. This would not even require superhuman intelligence. It is taking the best of what is currently done in two organizations and spreading best practices throughout society.

Conquering Space. We are now overcoming unnecessary delays and barriers to progress. The fully reusable rocket should have been developed in the 1980s with a correct version of the Space Shuttle. This would have required working out vertical landing of boosters and not just landing the Shuttle upper stage. Greater intelligence is not needed. We just needed less corruption and less stupidity. We now need time and continued execution on the correct designs and methods.

Conquering aging seems to be on track with aging reversal and aging damage repair. The aging reversal industry seems to be on a trajectory and approach which will deliver success.

Many Narrow Superintelligences Could Be Superior to Artificial General Intelligence

There is a large problem space for any potential AGI. Currently, it appears that narrow AI will continue to have advantages over general AI. A narrow AI can have more dedicated and concentrated data and computational resources to advance problem solutions. Google has created a data and resource moat around their search and advertising solutions. It is not clear that AGI would always beat many narrower AI across all problem areas. A slightly more generalized AI, muZero, was superior in chess, Go and Atari versus prior special purpose game AIs.