alt Hacker NewsI don't think there is evidence in either direction (takeoff impossible vs inevitable).
But the "convex hull" idea always came across as wishful thinking and hand-wavy pseudo-science to me.
Here's a rebuttal [0] of it from Tim Gowers (uses another math metaphor, but still clear and the whole thread is worth a read):
>...the popularity of the idea that AI "merely explores the convex hull" mystifies me. Why wouldn't it be more like the subgroup generated by existing mathematical knowledge? (That's also a metaphor -- I'm not saying there's a group structure.)
>The convex hull metaphor suggests that AI isn't having radically new ideas and will eventually run out of things to do, whereas the group metaphor suggests the possibility of building up in small steps to something well beyond what you started with, with no obvious limit.