I’m confused. I thought the intended argument is “Yes, there are simple changes to chimps that make them much better at accumulating culture; similarly we should expect there to be simple changes to neural nets that much improve their capabilities, and so just as humans had a ‘fast takeoff’ so too will neural nets”.
This implies that a “Yes” to Q1 supports fast takeoff. And I tend to agree with this—if there are only complicated changes that lead to discontinuities, then why expect that we will find them?
(Like, there is some program we can write that would be way, way more intelligent than us. You could think of that as a complicated change. But surely the existence of a superintelligence doesn’t tell us much about takeoff speeds.)
I also interpreted Richard as arguing that a “Yes” to Q1 would support fast takeoff, though I found it hard to follow the reasoning on how Q1 and Q2 relate to takeoff speeds (will write a top-level comment about this after this one).
Very good point; now I am confused. I think tentatively that Richard was too quick to make ” Are there simple changes to chimps (or other animals) that would make them much better at accumulating culture?” the crux on which “human progress would have been much less abrupt if evolution had been optimising for cultural ability all along” depends.
I’m confused. I thought the intended argument is “Yes, there are simple changes to chimps that make them much better at accumulating culture; similarly we should expect there to be simple changes to neural nets that much improve their capabilities, and so just as humans had a ‘fast takeoff’ so too will neural nets”.
This implies that a “Yes” to Q1 supports fast takeoff. And I tend to agree with this—if there are only complicated changes that lead to discontinuities, then why expect that we will find them?
(Like, there is some program we can write that would be way, way more intelligent than us. You could think of that as a complicated change. But surely the existence of a superintelligence doesn’t tell us much about takeoff speeds.)
I also interpreted Richard as arguing that a “Yes” to Q1 would support fast takeoff, though I found it hard to follow the reasoning on how Q1 and Q2 relate to takeoff speeds (will write a top-level comment about this after this one).
Very good point; now I am confused. I think tentatively that Richard was too quick to make ” Are there simple changes to chimps (or other animals) that would make them much better at accumulating culture?” the crux on which “human progress would have been much less abrupt if evolution had been optimising for cultural ability all along” depends.