Sara Walker: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. How much smarter is the collective intelligence of humans versus a single human? That’s the question of AGI versus human level intelligence, superhuman level intelligence versus human level intelligence. How much smarter can this thing, when done well, when we solve a lot of the computation complexities, maybe there’s some data complexities and how to really archive this thing, crystallize this thing really well, how powerful is this thing going to be? What’s your thought? Actually, I don’t like the language we use around that, and I think the language really matters. I don’t know how to talk about how much smarter one human is than another. Usually, we talk about abilities or particular talents someone has, and going back to David Deutsch’s idea of universal explainers, adopting the view that where the first kinds of structures are biosphere has built that can understand the rest of reality. We have this universal comprehension capability. He makes an argument that basically we’re the first things that actually are capable of understanding anything. It doesn’t mean… … Things that actually are capable of understanding anything. It doesn’t mean an individual understands everything, but we have that capability. And so there’s not a difference between that and what people talk about with AGI. In some sense, AGI is a universal explainer, but it might be that a computer is much more efficient at doing, I don’t know, prime factorization or something, than a human is. But it doesn’t mean that it’s necessarily smarter or has a broader reach of the kind of things that can understand than a human does. And so I think we really have to think about is it a level shift or is it we’re enhancing certain kinds of capabilities humans have in the same way that we enhanced eyesight by making telescopes and microscopes? Are we enhancing capabilities we have into technologies and the entire global ecosystem is getting more intelligent? Or is it really that we’re building some super machine in a box that’s going to be smart and kill everybody? It’s not even a science fiction narrative. It’s a bad science fiction narrative. I just don’t think it’s actually accurate to any of the technologies we’re building or the way that we should be describing them. It’s not even how we should be describing ourselves. So the benevolence stories, there’s a benevolent system that’s able to transform our economy, our way of life by just 10Xing the GDP of countries-…

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