I vaguely suspect that humans are not inherently well-suited to coordination in that sense, and that it would take an unusual cultural situation to achieve it. We never got anywhere close at any point in our history. It also seems likely that the window to achieve it could be fairly short. There seems to be a lot of widespread mathematical sophistication required as described, and I don’t think that naturally arises long before AI.
On the other hand, maybe some earlier paths of history could and normally should have put some useful social technology and traditions in place that would be built on later in many places and ways, but for some reason that didn’t happen for us. Some early unlikely accident predisposed us to our sorts of societies instead. Our sample size of 1 is difficult to generalize from.
I would put my credence median well below 1:1, but any distribution I have would be very broad, spanning orders of magnitude of likelihood and the overall credence something like 10%. Most of that would be “our early history was actually weird”.
Ah, I see! Yeah, I have pretty much no idea.
I vaguely suspect that humans are not inherently well-suited to coordination in that sense, and that it would take an unusual cultural situation to achieve it. We never got anywhere close at any point in our history. It also seems likely that the window to achieve it could be fairly short. There seems to be a lot of widespread mathematical sophistication required as described, and I don’t think that naturally arises long before AI.
On the other hand, maybe some earlier paths of history could and normally should have put some useful social technology and traditions in place that would be built on later in many places and ways, but for some reason that didn’t happen for us. Some early unlikely accident predisposed us to our sorts of societies instead. Our sample size of 1 is difficult to generalize from.
I would put my credence median well below 1:1, but any distribution I have would be very broad, spanning orders of magnitude of likelihood and the overall credence something like 10%. Most of that would be “our early history was actually weird”.