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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   37952 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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To an extent, it's just 'do what we're doing now, but better and faster'.

If you want to do something 'better' or 'faster' you have to do it differently in some way from how it was being done before. If you are just doing the same thing the same old way then it won't be any better or faster. So an intelligence would have to make war, do politics, economics, etc. in a different way than humans do, and it's not clear that "just be smarter bro" instantly unlocks those 'different' and scarily efficient ways of making war, doing politics.

It is difficult to answer this question empirically but the only real way to do so would be to look at historical conflicts, where it's far from clear that the 'smarter' side always wins. Unless you define 'smarter' tautologically as 'the side that was able to win.'

If you want to do something 'better' or 'faster' you have to do it differently in some way from how it was being done before

Take 'theoretical mathematics' as an example. Progress there is, to some extent, made by 'smart people thinking, scribbling, and talking'. An AI that was just 'JvN and colleagues but 1000x faster' could ... do that 1000x faster. Something similar applies to technology, economics, and war - the relation to the physical world means there's less of a speedup, but there's still some. An AI doesn't have to do anything that different from humans to get to in 50 years what humans would in 500.

progress there is, to some extent, made by 'smart people thinking, scribbling, and talking'.

A lot rides on "to what extent?" It's not clear to me that if you just 'sped up' the brains of top mathematicians or physicists by 10x or 50x or whatever it would actually cause a commensurate explosion in scientific breakthroughs.

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