Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

by Max Tegmark

The hardware and electricity costs of running the AI are crucial as well, since we won’t get an intelligence explosion until the cost of doing human-level work drops below human-level hourly wages. Suppose, for example, that the first human-level AGI can be efficiently run on the Amazon cloud at a cost of $1 million per hour of human-level work produced. This AI would have great novelty value and undoubtedly make headlines, but it wouldn’t undergo recursive self-improvement, because it would be much cheaper to keep using humans to improve it. Suppose that these humans gradually manage to cut the cost to $100,000/hour, $10,000/hour, $1,000/hour, $100/hour, $10/hour and finally $1/hour. By the time the cost of using the computer to reprogram itself finally drops far below the cost of paying human programmers to do the same, the humans can be laid off and the optimization power greatly expanded by buying cloud-computing time. This produces further cost cuts, allowing still more optimization power, and the intelligence explosion has begun.