Scott Alexander: belief

Transcript context

…Super intelligence is not even that smart. It just yells at every single worker. 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.…

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