Gwern: commitment

Transcript context

…One of the interesting points you made to me last year was that AI might be the most polymathic topic to think about because there’s no field or discipline that is not relevant to thinking about AI. Obviously you need computer science and hardware. But you also need things like primatology and understanding what changed between chimp and human brains, or the ultimate laws of physics that will constrain future AI civilizations. That’s all relevant to understanding AI. I wonder if it’s because of this polymathic nature of thinking about AI. that you’ve been especially productive at it. I'm not sure it was necessary. When I think about others who were correct, like Shane Legg or Dario Amodei, they don't seem to be all that polymathic. They just have broad intellectual curiosity, broad general understanding, absolutely. But they’re not absurdly polymathic. Clearly you could get to the correct view without being polymathic. That's just how I happen to come to it at this point and the connection I’m making post hoc. It wasn’t like I was using primatology to justify scaling to myself. It's more like I'm now using scaling to think about primatology. Because, obviously, if scaling is true, it has to tell us something about humans and monkeys and all other forms of intelligence. It just has to. If that works, it can't be a coincidence and totally unrelated. I refuse to believe that there are two totally unrelated kinds of intelligence, or paths to intelligence—where humans, monkeys, guppies, dogs are all one thing, and then neural networks and computers are another thing—and they have absolutely nothing to do with each other. That's obviously wrong. They can be two sides of the same coin. They can obviously have obscure connections. Maybe one could be a better form or whatever. They can't just be completely unrelated. As if humans finally got to Mars and then simultaneously a bunch of space aliens landed on Mars for the first time and that's how we met. You would never believe that. It would be just too absurd. What is it that you are trying to maximize in your life?…

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