Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.
Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.