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...Or unless intelligence suffers from diminishing returns, which actually seems fairly likely.
Where do these diminishing returns kick in? Just within the human form factor we support intelligences between your average fool and real geniuses. It seems awfully unlikely that the returns diminish sharply at the top end of the curve built by natural selection under many constraints. Or maybe you mean to application of intelligence, in which case I'd say just within our current constraints it has given us the nuclear bomb, it can manufacture pandemics, it can penetrate and shut down important technical infrastructure. If there are some diminishing returns to its application how confident are you that the wonders between where we are now and where it diminishes are lesser to normal distributional inequality that we've dealt with for thousands of years?
I'm not sure, but anecdotally I have found that the tail ends of the IQ bell-curve tend to manifest themselves in broadly similar ways. High levels of neuroticism, short time preferences, lack of ability to self-regulate or exercise agency, a propensity for addictive and co-dependent behavior, and difficulty with things like object permanence and constructing functional theories of mind.
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Within the human scale, at the point where Von Neumann was a functionary, where neither New Soviet Man nor the Thousand Year Reich arrived, where Technocracy is a bad joke, and where Sherlock Holmes has never existed, even in the aggregate.
We can do all those things. Can it generate airborne nano factories whose product causes all humans to drop dead within the same second? I'm skeptical.
Did a notably finite number of very smart people produce nuclear bombs yes or no? Can a notably finite number of very smart people almost certainly produce a super pandemic yes or no? And these are the absolutely mundane appliations of intelligence.
It seems to me that there is a long tradition of smart people coming together an inventing new and not distantly in the past foreseen weapons and technologies. The very nature of these advancements not being seen far before they came about makes conjuring up specific predictions impossible. You can always call anything specific science fiction, but nuclear was science fiction at one point. And there is of course just the more mundane issue of a sufficiently advanced AI that is merely willing to give cranks the already known ability to manufacture super weapons could be existential.
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Does it? The human brain is only about three times larger than the chimpanzee brain. But that 3x difference enabled us to take over the world. Or, as Scott put it:
I've got to say, sometimes it is pretty funny being on a board where two of the abiding topics of concern are, distilled down a bit, "high IQ people being wiped out by lower-IQ people" and "high IQ AI wiping out lower-IQ people."
Anyway, there's obviously not a direct correlation between intelligence and existential risk. Creatures with an IQ of 0 on a scale of 1 - 100 for intelligence are in a far less precarious position, existentially speaking, than creatures with an IQ of 100 (us). Intelligence is only an imperfect proxy measurement for power and power is what generates existential risk.
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It seems to me that it does, yes. If your intelligence scales a hundred-fold, but the complexity of the thing you want to do scales a billion-fold, you have lost progress, not gained it. The AI risk model is that intelligence scales faster than complexity and that hard limits don't exist; it's not actually clear that this is the case, and the general stagnation of scientific progress gives some evidence that the opposite is the case. It seems entirely possible to me that even a superintelligent AI runs into hard limits before it begins devouring the stars.
Now on the one hand, this doesn't seem like something I'd want to gamble on. On the other hand, it's obviously not my choice whether we gamble on it or not; AI safety has pretty clearly failed by its own standards, there is no particular reason to believe that "safe" AI is a thing that can even potentially exist, and we are going to shoot for AGI anyway. What will happen will happen. The question is, how should AI doomsday worries effect my own decisions? And the answer, it seems to me, is that I should proceed from the assumption that AI doomsday won't happen, because that's the branch where my decisions matter to any significant degree. I can solve neither AI doomsday nor metastable vacuum decay. Better to worry about the problems I can solve.
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