Scott Alexander: belief

Transcript context

…You guys are the conservative crowd, you know? We think it’s going to hit bottlenecks the same as all these previous processes. The last time this hit a bottleneck, if you take the hyperbola view, is in, like 1960, when humans stopped reproducing at the same rate they were reproducing before. We hit a population bottleneck, the usual population, two ideas, flywheel stopped working, and then we stagnated for a while. If you can create a country of geniuses in a data center, as I think Dario Amodei put it, then you no longer have this population bottleneck, and you’re just expecting continuation of those pre-1960 trends. So I realize all of these historical hyperbolas are also kind of weird, also kind of theoretical, but I don’t think we’re saying anything that there isn’t models for which have previously seemed to work for long historical periods. Another thing also is, I think people equivocate between slow and continuous, right? So if you look at our scenario, there’s this continuous trend that runs through the whole thing of this algorithmic progress multiplier. And we’re not having discrete jumps from like 0 to 5x to 25x. We have this continuous improvement. So I think continuous is not the crux. The crux is like, is it going to be this fast? You know, and we don’t know, maybe it’ll be slower, maybe it’ll be faster. But we have our arguments for why we think maybe this fast.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.