.@fleetingbits on Richard Ngo’s fear that the next decade of AI could feel like a Shepard tone, with the singularity forever seeming just around the corner: "It's reasonable for timelines to appear short while being longer, and a lot of it depends on what the bottleneck actually is." "You just have to run some number of experiments in order to figure out how to cure cancer. It doesn't matter how good your machine learning model is. If you don't have the data, you can't solve it." "It could feel like we're constantly approaching the singularity because different domains are falling all the time, but the very important domains take a long time to fully unlock." "Even if we had artificial superintelligence today, it's hard to know if we could instantly get the transit systems in New York or San Francisco to run better. There's gonna be some process to get the MTA or the BART to adopt whatever the improvements are."