Carl Shulman: prediction

Transcript context

…That is so interesting. Not to mention of course that if you had 2x the brain size, without c-section you or your mother or both would die. This is a question I've actually been curious about for over a year and I’ve briefly tried to look up an answer. I know this was off topic and my apologies to the audience, but I was super interested and that was the most comprehensive and interesting answer I could have hoped for. So yeah, we have a good explanation or good first principles evolution or reason for thinking that intelligence scaling up to humans is not implausible just by throwing more scale at it. I would also add that we also have the brain right here with us available for neuroscience to reverse engineer its properties. This was something that would have mattered to me more in the 2000s. Back then when I said, yeah, I expect this by the middle of the century-ish, that was a backstop if we found it absurdly difficult to get to the algorithms and then we would learn from neuroscience. But in actual history, it's really not like that. We develop things in AI and then also we can say oh, yeah, this is like this thing in neuroscience or maybe this is a good explanation. It's not as though neuroscience Is driving AI progress. It turns out not to be that necessary. I guess that is similar to how planes were inspired by the existence proof of birds but jet engines don't flap. All right, good reason to think scaling might work. So we spent a hundred billion dollars and we have something that is like human level or can help significantly with AI research.…

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