Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I see where it’s coming from. At the same time, I do feel like people make this assumption of, “We have God in a box, and now it can do everything,” and it just won’t look like that. It’s going to be able to do some of the things. It’s going to fail at some other things. It’s going to be gradually put into society, and we’ll end up with the same pattern. That is my prediction. This assumption of suddenly having a completely intelligent, fully flexible, fully general human in a box, and we can dispense it at arbitrary problems in society, I don’t think that we will have this discrete change. I think we’ll arrive at the same kind of gradual diffusion of this across the industry. It often ends up being misleading in these conversations. I don’t like to use the word intelligence in this context because intelligence implies you think there’ll be a single superintelligence sitting in a server and it’ll divine how to come up with new technologies and inventions that cause this explosion. That’s not what I’m imagining when I’m imagining 20% growth. I’m imagining that there are billions of very smart human-like minds, potentially, or that’s all that’s required. But the fact that there’s hundreds of millions of them, billions of them, each individually making new products, figuring out how to integrate themselves into the economy. If a highly experienced smart immigrant came to the country, you wouldn’t need to figure out how we integrate them in the economy. They figure it out. They could start a company, they could make inventions, or increase productivity in the world. We have examples, even in the current regime, of places that have had 10-20% economic growth. If you just have a lot of people and less capital in comparison to the people, you can have Hong Kong or Shenzhen or whatever with decades of 10% plus growth. There’s a lot of really smart people who are ready to make use of the resources and do this period of catch-up because we’ve had this discontinuity, and I think AI might be similar. I understand, but I still think that you’re presupposing some discrete jump. There’s some unlock that we’re waiting to claim. And suddenly we’re going to have geniuses in data centers. I still think you’re presupposing some discrete jump that has no historical precedent that I can’t find in any of the statistics and that I think probably won’t happen.…

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