“To stick my neck out further: I am liable to trust the Weak Inside View over a “surface” extrapolation, if the Weak Inside View drills down to a deeper causal level and the balance of support is sufficiently lopsided.”
But there’s the question of whether the balance of support is sufficiently lopsided, and if so, on which side. Your example illustrates this nicely:
“I will go ahead and say, “I don’t care if you say that Moore’s Law has held for the last hundred years. Human thought was a primary causal force in producing Moore’s Law, and your statistics are all over a domain of human neurons running at the same speed. If you substitute better-designed minds running at a million times human clock speed, the rate of progress ought to speed up—qualitatively speaking.”″
What you’re not taking into account is that computers are increasingly used to help design and verify the next generation of chips. In other words, a greater amount of machine intelligence is required each generation just to keep the doubling time the same (or only slightly longer), never mind shorter.
Once we appreciate this, we can understand why: as the low hanging fruit is plucked, each new Moore’s Law generation has to solve problems that are intrinsically more difficult. But we didn’t think of that in advance. It’s an explanation in hindsight.
That doesn’t mean we can be sure the doubling time will still be 18 to 24 months, 60 years from now. It does mean we have no way to make a better prediction than that. It means that is the prediction on which rationalists should base their plans. Historically, those who based their plans on weak (or even strong) inside predictions of progress faster (or slower) than Moore’s Law, like Nelson and Xanadu, or Star Bridge and their hypercomputers, have come to grief. Those who just looked at the graphs, have found success.
“To stick my neck out further: I am liable to trust the Weak Inside View over a “surface” extrapolation, if the Weak Inside View drills down to a deeper causal level and the balance of support is sufficiently lopsided.”
But there’s the question of whether the balance of support is sufficiently lopsided, and if so, on which side. Your example illustrates this nicely:
“I will go ahead and say, “I don’t care if you say that Moore’s Law has held for the last hundred years. Human thought was a primary causal force in producing Moore’s Law, and your statistics are all over a domain of human neurons running at the same speed. If you substitute better-designed minds running at a million times human clock speed, the rate of progress ought to speed up—qualitatively speaking.”″
What you’re not taking into account is that computers are increasingly used to help design and verify the next generation of chips. In other words, a greater amount of machine intelligence is required each generation just to keep the doubling time the same (or only slightly longer), never mind shorter.
Once we appreciate this, we can understand why: as the low hanging fruit is plucked, each new Moore’s Law generation has to solve problems that are intrinsically more difficult. But we didn’t think of that in advance. It’s an explanation in hindsight.
That doesn’t mean we can be sure the doubling time will still be 18 to 24 months, 60 years from now. It does mean we have no way to make a better prediction than that. It means that is the prediction on which rationalists should base their plans. Historically, those who based their plans on weak (or even strong) inside predictions of progress faster (or slower) than Moore’s Law, like Nelson and Xanadu, or Star Bridge and their hypercomputers, have come to grief. Those who just looked at the graphs, have found success.