And digital brains can generate certain sorts of random ideas much faster than carbon ones.
Even for humans, ideas are comparatively cheap to generate; the problem is generating valid insights. So rather than focusing on ability to generate ideas, it seems to me it would be better to focus on ability to generate valid insights, e.g. by conducting mental experiments, or by computing all logical consequences of sets of axioms, etc.
The AI may have the advantage of being able to test many hypothesis in parallel. For example, if it can generate 10000 hypotheses on how to manipulate people, it could contact a million people and test each hypothesis on 100 of them. Similarly, with some initial capital, it could create thousand different companies, and observe which strategies succeed and which ones fail.
Even for humans, ideas are comparatively cheap to generate; the problem is generating valid insights. So rather than focusing on ability to generate ideas, it seems to me it would be better to focus on ability to generate valid insights, e.g. by conducting mental experiments, or by computing all logical consequences of sets of axioms, etc.
The AI may have the advantage of being able to test many hypothesis in parallel. For example, if it can generate 10000 hypotheses on how to manipulate people, it could contact a million people and test each hypothesis on 100 of them. Similarly, with some initial capital, it could create thousand different companies, and observe which strategies succeed and which ones fail.
Yes, that’s the kind of thing I find impressive/scary. Not merely generating ideas.