How long until you can spend $20 and ask ChatGPT for the schematics of a Von Nuemann probe?
But humans have been manipulating language, apparently intelligently, for tens of thousands of years, and billions of us have spent the last 30 years or so making a huge corpus of digitized words.
What we have not done is to make a huge corpus of digital things that can be manipulated by a computer program. We have books about machining, engineering, etc, and we are still pretty bad about turning written descriptions into working objects. (Read about “technology transfer”. For better or for worse, a lot of manufacturing seems to need experience, not just manuals.) Nicely drawn schematics don’t necessarily work at all, let alone replicate.
It seems quite likely that the robotic AI revolution will happen, but I expect it to be a while.
1) Current AI tech is already nearing the top of the S-curve. In this case it will do nothing to help humans in the "real world", it will just replace much of the human labor currently used to create/manipulate bits.
2) Current AI tech is near the bottom of the S-curve. It continues to ratchet up and its capabilities become super-human, as you outline. In which case, how long until the AI capable of creating self-replicating machines realizes it doesn't need to listen to humans anymore, or even keep them around?
Transformer models don't realize or need stuff.
All we know for sure is that sensory data is generated, the brain does what it does, and then we have acted. We can’t break that down too well once it leaves the visual areas, but there is clear data that the linguistic form of decisions and so on lag behind the neurological signs of the action.
And humans have a well known tendency to make a decision on a linguistic level that they then fail to carry out in the realm of actions.