Actually, I think the steam engine is the best example of Richard’s thesis, and I wish he had talked about it more. Before Newcomen, there was Denis Papin and Thomas Savery, who invented steam devices which were nearly useless and arguably not engines. Newcomen’s engine was the first commercially successful true engine, and even then it was arguably inferior to wind, water, or muscle power, only being practical in the very narrow case of pumping water out of coal mines. It wasn’t until the year 1800 (decades after the first engines) that they became useful enough for locomotion.
There was even an experience curve, noticed by Henry Adams, where each successive engine did more work and used less coal. Henry Adam’s curve was similar to Moore’s Law in many respects.
If the thesis is “There exists for every technological innovation in history some metric along which its performance is a smooth continuation of previous trends within some time window”, then yes, like I said, I agree at the object level, and my objection is at the meta level, namely that such an observation is worthless as there is basically no way to violate it. Disjunct over enough terms and the statement is bound to become true, but then it explains everything and therefore nothing.
Taking AGI as an example: Does slow takeoff fit the bill? Check. Scaling hypothesis implies AGI will become gradually more competent with more compute. Does hard takeoff fit the bill? Check. Recursive self-improvement implies there is a continuous chain of subagents bootstrapping from a seed AGI to superintelligence (even though it looks like Judgment Day from the outside).
If humanity survives a hard AI takeoff, I bet some future econblogger is going to draw a curve and say “Look! Each of these subagents is only a modest improvement over the last, there’s no discontinuity! Like every other technology, AI follows the same development pattern!”
Actually, I think the steam engine is the best example of Richard’s thesis, and I wish he had talked about it more. Before Newcomen, there was Denis Papin and Thomas Savery, who invented steam devices which were nearly useless and arguably not engines. Newcomen’s engine was the first commercially successful true engine, and even then it was arguably inferior to wind, water, or muscle power, only being practical in the very narrow case of pumping water out of coal mines. It wasn’t until the year 1800 (decades after the first engines) that they became useful enough for locomotion.
There was even an experience curve, noticed by Henry Adams, where each successive engine did more work and used less coal. Henry Adam’s curve was similar to Moore’s Law in many respects.
If the thesis is “There exists for every technological innovation in history some metric along which its performance is a smooth continuation of previous trends within some time window”, then yes, like I said, I agree at the object level, and my objection is at the meta level, namely that such an observation is worthless as there is basically no way to violate it. Disjunct over enough terms and the statement is bound to become true, but then it explains everything and therefore nothing.
Taking AGI as an example: Does slow takeoff fit the bill? Check. Scaling hypothesis implies AGI will become gradually more competent with more compute. Does hard takeoff fit the bill? Check. Recursive self-improvement implies there is a continuous chain of subagents bootstrapping from a seed AGI to superintelligence (even though it looks like Judgment Day from the outside).
If humanity survives a hard AI takeoff, I bet some future econblogger is going to draw a curve and say “Look! Each of these subagents is only a modest improvement over the last, there’s no discontinuity! Like every other technology, AI follows the same development pattern!”