Self sufficient AI (Import AI

When could we get self-sufficient AI? It all depends on humanoid robots:
…What comes after RSI? Self-sustaining AI…
I’ve spent a lot of this year writing about recursive self-improvement – the notion that we might soon build AI systems that are smart enough they can autonomously design their own successors. But RSI still requires datacenters and these datacenters require equipment and electricity and everything else. 
An interesting interview in Asterisk magazine asks the question about when we might get self-sustaining AI, which one of the interviewees – Ajeya Cotra, a forecaster and on staff at METR, defines as “AI systems integrated with physical infrastructure — factories, mines, fabs, robots to operate all of those — such that they don’t need any cognitive or physical inputs from human labor to keep growing their own population.”

How far away is it? Ajeya thinks we could get self-sustaining AI within 10 years (so by 2036). The other interviewee, Timothy B. Lee, journalist and author of Understanding AI, has much longer timelines: “less than 10% chance that it happens within 20 years. I’d say there’s a 10 or 20% chance it’s never, and my median would be 50 years.”

What are some challenges – tacit knowledge might be one: “Imagine if all the employees in the entire semiconductor industry disappeared — the machines and textbooks remain, but none of the people. How long would it take for the rest of humanity to restart the fabs? It’s quite possible that would take decades. Because even though you might have the textbooks, there’s a lot of tacit knowledge inside these machines,” Lee notes. Ajeya’s response is that this is something the tech might be able to route around: “There are two counters to the tacit knowledge hypothetical. One is that we’d have trained AI systems with reinforcement learning on that tacit knowledge because it’s profitable to automate what the Taiwanese worker was doing. The other is that AIs might get really generally intelligent in the sense of quickly figuring out new things by trying them, reading textbooks, and experimenting efficiently.”

What are things people would need to see in the next 2-3 years to think self-sustaining AI could arrive soon?
Ajeya: “I’d want a line on a graph showing improvement of robotic hands, and another line showing the rate at which we’re manufacturing humanoid robots”, and on the cognitive side just paying attention to benchmarks evaluating things like robustness to perturbations in the environment.
Timothy: “I’m going to want to watch how the humanoid robots develop: the number of robots, their capabilities, and particularly their cost and repairability”.

Why this matters – true takeover requires human redundancy: Most maximalist doom visions require the AI to have the ability to no longer need humans at all, which means measuring progress towards self-sustaining AI is important as it is implicitly a measure of the declining leverage that humans have in negotiating with the synthetic intelligences being built. 
Read more: How Long Until AI Doesn’t Need Humans?, Ajeya Cotra, Timothy B. Lee (Asterisk magazine).