site banner
PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1445 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 11, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

3
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

The AI 2027 guys have updated their timeline, pushing back the estimated time until a superhuman coder appears to 2032.

Does anybody else feel like they just got a stay of execution?

Not particularly, this seems to be following the usual trajectory of "in five years time" for all claimed World-Shattering Advances. As we get nearer to 2032, I wouldn't be surprised for more 'updated' timelines about "well we mean by 2036" and so on.

I'm not saying AI won't happen, I'm saying the fairytale AI won't happen. No superhuman ASI better at everything than the best human. AI integrated into our work lives the same way email and the Internet became integrated, and for once a shakeup in white collar jobs first, but no "now we have AI running the economic planning for us". Robot factories supervised by four or five humans cranking out cars? Yeah, that's plausible. AI working out how to colonise the light cone? Come off it.

I'm not sure how you could be confident of that because the entire point of "fast takeoff" is the nonlinearity. It's not saying "AI is going to improve steadily at a fast pace and we're going to get 10% of the way closer to lightcone speed each year for 10 years. It's "At some point, AI will be slightly smarter than humans at coding. Once it does that, it can write its own code and make itself smarter. Once it can do that, growth suddenly become exponential because the smarter AI can make itself smarter faster. And then who knows what happens after that?"

I'm not 100% convinced that this is how things play out, but "AI is gradually but slowly getting better at coding" is weak evidence towards that possibility, not against it.

We're relying heavily on "the AI can make itself smarter" for this. We've been trying to make ourselves smarter for a long time, and the results are mixed. Perhaps "regression to the mean" will apply to AI also, and the product of "it rewrote its code to be smarter" is "well uh turns out that made it reset to an earlier state".

We've been trying to make ourselves smarter for a long time

What? We have basically no forms of self-modification available whatsoever. You can study and reason, I guess, which is vaguely like adding training data to an AI. You can try Eugenics, but that's highly controversial, incredibly slow, and has not been tried at scale for long enough. Hitler tried and then people stopped him before he could get very far. Gene editing technology is very new and barely used due to controversy and not being good enough and taking decades to get any sort of feedback on.

We have NOT been "trying to make ourselves smarter" in the same way or any way comparable to an AI writing code for a new AI with the express purpose of making it smarter. What we have been doing is trying to make AI smarter with more powerful computers and better algorithms and training and it has worked. The AI of this year is way smarter than the AI of last year, because coders got better at what they're doing and made progress that made it smarter. If you have more and better coders you get smarter AI. We can't do that to humans... yet. Maybe some day we will. But we don't have the technology to genetically engineer smarter humans in a similar way, so I don't know what sort of comparison you're trying to make here.

Education, better nutrition, recommendations from Top Medical Men about what to/what not to eat, drink, sleep, wear, how hot or cold your house should be, and the old-fashioned "just do it like we breed racehorses: get smart men to marry smart women and pump out smart kids".

We haven't yet been able to stick pins into our brains to re-write our code, but we'll try that as soon as something seems vaguely plausible (Neurolink, maybe?) Somebody out there is going to try and use AI to do "adult genetic engineering, rewrite your cells on the fly" to get Moar Bigger Brain.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats