{"id":1183,"date":"2016-08-28T12:17:55","date_gmt":"2016-08-28T20:17:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/?p=1183"},"modified":"2023-02-12T09:57:28","modified_gmt":"2023-02-12T17:57:28","slug":"ai-phase-change","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2016\/08\/28\/ai-phase-change\/","title":{"rendered":"AI Phase Change?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of the weakest claims in <a href=\"http:\/\/ageofem.com\">The Age of Em<\/a> was that AI progress has not been accelerating.<\/p>\n<p>J Storrs Hall (aka Josh) has a <a href=\"http:\/\/wimflyc.blogspot.com\/2016\/08\/the-coming-ai-phase-change.html\">hypothesis<\/a> that AI progress accelerated about a decade ago due to a shift from academia to industry. (I&#8217;m puzzled why the title describes it as a coming change, when it appears to have already happened).<\/p>\n<p>I find it quite likely that something important happened then, including an acceleration in the rate at which AI affects people.<\/p>\n<p>I find it less clear whether that indicates a change in how fast AI is approaching human intelligence levels.<\/p>\n<p>Josh points to airplanes as an example of a phase change being important.<\/p>\n<p>I tried to compare AI progress to other industries which might have experienced a similar phase change, driven by hardware progress. But I was deterred by the difficulty of estimating progress in industries when they were driven by academia.<\/p>\n<p>One industry I tried to compare to was photovoltaics, which seemed to be hyped for a long time before becoming commercially important (10-20 years ago?). But I see only weak signs of a phase change around 2007, from looking at <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Swanson%27s_law\">Swanson&#8217;s Law<\/a>. It&#8217;s unclear whether photovoltaic progress was ever dominated by academia enough for a phase change to be important.<\/p>\n<p>Hypertext is a domain where a clear phase change happened in the earl 1990s. It experienced a nearly foom-like rate of adoption when internet availability altered the problem, from one that required a big company to finance the hardware and marketing, to a problem that could be solved by simply giving away a small amount of code. But this change in adoption was not accompanied by a change in the power of hypertext software (beyond changes due to <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Network_effect\">network effects<\/a>). So this seems like weak evidence against accelerating progress toward human-level AI.<\/p>\n<p>What other industries should I look at?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of the weakest claims in The Age of Em was that AI progress has not been accelerating. J Storrs Hall (aka Josh) has a hypothesis that AI progress accelerated about a decade ago due to a shift from academia to industry. (I&#8217;m puzzled why the title describes it as a coming change, when it [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[26],"tags":[154],"class_list":["post-1183","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ai","tag-ageofem"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-j5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1183"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1185,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1183\/revisions\/1185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1183"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1183"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1183"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}