The two examples everyone loves to use to demonstrate that massive top-down engineering projects can sometimes be a viable alternative to iterative design (the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program) were both government-led initiatives, rather than single very smart people working alone in their garages. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that governments have considerably more capacity to steer outcomes than individuals, and are the most powerful optimizers that exist at this time.
I think restricting the term “superintelligence” to “only that which can create functional self-replicators with nano-scale components” is misleading. Concretely, that definition of “superintelligence” says that natural selection is superintelligent, while the most capable groups of humans are nowhere close, even with computerized tooling.
The two examples everyone loves to use to demonstrate that massive top-down engineering projects can sometimes be a viable alternative to iterative design (the Manhattan Project and the Apollo Program) were both government-led initiatives, rather than single very smart people working alone in their garages. I think it’s reasonable to conclude that governments have considerably more capacity to steer outcomes than individuals, and are the most powerful optimizers that exist at this time.
I think restricting the term “superintelligence” to “only that which can create functional self-replicators with nano-scale components” is misleading. Concretely, that definition of “superintelligence” says that natural selection is superintelligent, while the most capable groups of humans are nowhere close, even with computerized tooling.