I suspect that I’m gonna keep sharing quotes as I read Superintelligence over the next few weeks, in large part because Professor Bostrom has a better sense of humor than I thought he would when I saw him on YouTube.
I’ve known for a long time that intelligences with faster cognitive processes would experience a sort of time dilation, but I’ve never seen it described in such an evocative and amusing way:
To such a fast mind, events in the external world appear to unfold in slow motion. Suppose your mind ran at 10,000×. If your fleshly friend should happen to drop his teacup, you could watch the porcelain slowly descend toward the carpet over the course of several hours, like a comet silently gliding through space toward an assignation with a far-off planet; and, as the anticipation of the coming crash tardily propagates through the folds of your friend’s gray matter and from thence out into his peripheral nervous system, you could observe his body gradually assuming the aspect of a frozen oops—enough time for you not only to order a replacement cup but also to read a couple of scientific papers and take a nap.
If you drop a teacup from a height of 2m then s = 1⁄2 at^2 says t ~= 0.6 seconds which at 10000x becomes 6000 seconds or 1h40m. If the figure for Nick Bostrom is “several hours” then he must be, I dunno, attending tea parties on stilts or something.
(Of course this is mere pedantry. But it seems like the sort of thing it should have been easy to get right.)
You reminded me of something he wrote in the acknowledgements:
The membrane that has surrounded the writing process has been fairly permeable. Many concepts and ideas generated while working on the book have been allowed to seep out and have become part of a wider conversation; and, of course, numerous insights originating from the outside while the book was underway have been incorporated into the text. I have tried to be somewhat diligent with the citation apparatus, but the influences are too many to fully document.
Citations are one of the most important aspects of any non-fiction book, and even in this regard he acknowledges that he could not be exhaustive. To confirm the physical calculations implicit in a descriptive passage would almost certainly have been suboptimal. All to say, I am happy that Professor Bostrom is the one writing the Superintelligences of the world, and not the pedants.
He could have made the descriptive passage correct simply by not pretending to be so quantitative. “Suppose your mind ran tens of thousands of times faster than normal.”
Extraneous considerations of extraneous yet harmless quantitativeness would have been similarly suboptimal. The pseudo-quantativeness also has a positive effect upon the tone of the passage, for everyone but the one in a million who notice its extremely technical inaccuracy. This is not math, but writing.
I suspect that I’m gonna keep sharing quotes as I read Superintelligence over the next few weeks, in large part because Professor Bostrom has a better sense of humor than I thought he would when I saw him on YouTube.
I’ve known for a long time that intelligences with faster cognitive processes would experience a sort of time dilation, but I’ve never seen it described in such an evocative and amusing way:
If you drop a teacup from a height of 2m then s = 1⁄2 at^2 says t ~= 0.6 seconds which at 10000x becomes 6000 seconds or 1h40m. If the figure for Nick Bostrom is “several hours” then he must be, I dunno, attending tea parties on stilts or something.
(Of course this is mere pedantry. But it seems like the sort of thing it should have been easy to get right.)
You reminded me of something he wrote in the acknowledgements:
Citations are one of the most important aspects of any non-fiction book, and even in this regard he acknowledges that he could not be exhaustive. To confirm the physical calculations implicit in a descriptive passage would almost certainly have been suboptimal. All to say, I am happy that Professor Bostrom is the one writing the Superintelligences of the world, and not the pedants.
He could have made the descriptive passage correct simply by not pretending to be so quantitative. “Suppose your mind ran tens of thousands of times faster than normal.”
Extraneous considerations of extraneous yet harmless quantitativeness would have been similarly suboptimal. The pseudo-quantativeness also has a positive effect upon the tone of the passage, for everyone but the one in a million who notice its extremely technical inaccuracy. This is not math, but writing.