From: Billy Brown <bbrown@conemsco.com>
<extracted from a conversation about the arrival of SI's>
>I say 'it', because I expect human-equivalent hardware to arrive several
>years before human-equivalent AI. That means the first self-enhancing AI
>that doesn't bottleneck will have the hardware to go from transhuman to SI
>in a matter of days, at most. At that point humans are far to slow to
>interfere with it - it can invent general-purpose assemblers, use someone's
>automated lab equipment to build one, and migrate itself to rapid
>infrastructure in a matter of hours. A few hours after that we've got a
>full-grown Power on our hands.
The first AI may well be highly intelligent and a quick learner, but it will also almost certianly have to be spoon fed knowledge in its earliest stages and should be spottable as it 'grows up' . The chances of an AI spontanteouslycoming into being fully formed seems pretty low, as does the chances of an AI coming into being at a low level and increasing it's intelligence without tipping off the people around it (imagine managing to grow up from a baby to teenager whilst fooling the people around you into thinking that you only had baby-level intelligence - Especially if you didn't know that you had to make them think this.
Samael