Dwarkesh Patel: evaluation

Transcript context

…Yeah, I mean that’s, that is kind of my model is that we have some, we have something which is smarter than Elon Musk, better at optimizing things than Elon Musk. We have 10,000 parts in a rocket supply chain. How many of those parts can Elon personally like yell at people to optimize? We could have a different copy of the superintelligence optimizing every single part full-time. I think that’s just a really big speed up. I think both of those examples don’t work in your favor. I think the China growth miracle could not have occurred if not for their ability to copy technology from the west and I don’t think there’s a world in which they… China has a lot of really smart people, it’s a big country in general. Even then I think they couldn’t have just divined how to make airplanes after becoming a communist hell basket, right? The AIs cannot just copy nanobots from aliens, it’s got to make them from scratch. And then on the Elon example, it took them two decades of countless experiments, failing in weird ways you would not have expected. And still, rocketry we’ve been doing since the 60s, maybe actually World War II, and then just getting from a small rocket to a really big rocket took two decades of all kinds of weird experiments, even with the smartest and most competent people in the world. So you’re focusing on the nanobots, I want to ask a couple questions. One, what about just the regular robots? And then two, what would your quantities be for all of these things? So first, what about the regular robots? Yeah, nanobots are presumably a lot harder to make than regular robot factories. And in our story they happen later. It sounds like right now you’re saying even if we did get the whole robot factory thing going, it would still take a ton of additional full-economy, broad automation for a long time to get to something like nanobots. That’s totally plausible to me. I could totally imagine that happening. I don’t feel like the scenario particularly depends on that final bit about getting the nanobots. They don’t actually really make any difference to the story. The robot economy does sort of make a difference because there’s two branches endings, as you know. And in one of the endings, the AIs end up misaligned and end up taking over. And it’s an important strategic change when the AIs are self sufficient and totally in charge of everything and they don’t actually need the humans anymore. And so what I’m interested in is, when has the robot economy advanced to the point where they don’t really depend on humans? So quantitatively, what would your guess for that be? If hypothetically we had the army of superintelligences in early 2028, and hypothetically also assume that the US President is super bullish on deploying this into the economy to beat China, etc, so the political stuff is all set up in the way that we have. How many years do you think it would be until there are so many automated factories producing automated self driving cars and robots that are themselves building more factories and so forth, that if all the humans dropped dead it would just keep chugging along, and, maybe it would slow down a bit, but it would still be fine?…

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