I don’t love it and I don’t know if it’s possible to have better dynamics, but I feel like certain terms and positions end up having a lot of worldview [lossily?] “compressed” into them. Short and long timelines is one of them, and fast/slow takeoff might be the next big one, where my read is slow takeoff was a reason for optimism because there’s time to fix things as AIs get gradually more powerful.
But to the extent the term could mean any number of things or naively is read to mean something other than the originator meant by it, that is bad and kudos to Raemon for pointing it out. I don’t distinctly remember read this post but I do at some point (perhaps via Raemon) having it pointed out that there was confusion around the term.
Ironically, I actually think I attach different default meaning to “faster” than Raemon does, in this title saying “even faster takeoff”. To me “fast” is about slope of the curve and so makes sense. But this just underscores the importance.
My hope is that somehow we abandon terms that aren’t clear in favor of ones that less ambiguously encode their predictions. If we could somehow say something like “slow doubling before faster doubling”, that’d be good. Or if we want to do quadrants of rapid/gradual takeoff and soon/late onset.
Predictions are what matters, but how to describe predictions succinctly is hard when You Get About Five Words (or three syllables).
I don’t love it and I don’t know if it’s possible to have better dynamics, but I feel like certain terms and positions end up having a lot of worldview [lossily?] “compressed” into them. Short and long timelines is one of them, and fast/slow takeoff might be the next big one, where my read is slow takeoff was a reason for optimism because there’s time to fix things as AIs get gradually more powerful.
But to the extent the term could mean any number of things or naively is read to mean something other than the originator meant by it, that is bad and kudos to Raemon for pointing it out. I don’t distinctly remember read this post but I do at some point (perhaps via Raemon) having it pointed out that there was confusion around the term.
Ironically, I actually think I attach different default meaning to “faster” than Raemon does, in this title saying “even faster takeoff”. To me “fast” is about slope of the curve and so makes sense. But this just underscores the importance.
My hope is that somehow we abandon terms that aren’t clear in favor of ones that less ambiguously encode their predictions. If we could somehow say something like “slow doubling before faster doubling”, that’d be good. Or if we want to do quadrants of rapid/gradual takeoff and soon/late onset.
Predictions are what matters, but how to describe predictions succinctly is hard when You Get About Five Words (or three syllables).