Right. The author shows no understanding of the difference in fissionability between the U-235 and U-238 isotopes. Naive, and yet, there's so much life and natural curiosity to the author's style, it's a delight to read regardless. Why isn't today's SA like that?
All analogies are leaky, and I think this one is particularly misguided. Why would you want to draw parallels between uranium and AI? You can go a long way speculating about...
What's the equivalent of enriched uranium for healthcare?
What's the equivalent of enriched uranium for calculus?
What's the equivalent of enriched uranium for sweatshirts?
It's actually a much better analogy than you think. Machine learning (which is at least a significant part of AI) requires a certain 'critical mass' of computing power and learning data before it becomes powerful. We had neuron models in the 90s that were roughly equivalent to what we have today and they were deemed largely useless, just like the uranium in the article. All that changed was the data and compute power available.
As for 'critical mass', a defining characteristic of consciousness is that it's self-referential, so that seems like a fair guess.
Well yeah, the feedback loop is assumed to happen once the AI system becomes powerful enough to understand and optimize its own operation better than humans can. Basically the premise is that AI development speed is bounded by the capability of the mind working on the AI, so max(human, AI). AI intelligence grows faster than human intelligence (which has reached the limits of easy improvements and is thus arguably capped by population size, which has also stagnated), so the inflection point is assumed to happen once the second term outstrips the first.
It can replace all those pythons, javas with super efficient platform tailor-optimised machine code, gaining remarkable computational benefits. I mean programmers will also loose jobs one day, AI will replace them too only couple of years later than taxi drivers. But actually I'm looking forward to it, as programmers are extremely cocky these days.
