Scott Alexander: uncertainty

Transcript context

…One of my favorite meme images is this graph showing world GDP over time. You’ve probably seen it, it spikes up and then there’s a little thought bubble at the top of the spike in 2010 or something. And the thought bubble says, “my life is pretty normal, I have a good grasp of what’s weird versus standard and people thinking about different futures with digital minds and space travel are just engaging in silly speculation”. The point of the graph is, actually there’s been amazing transformative changes in the course of history that would have seemed totally insane to people multiple times. We’ve gone through multiple such waves of those things. Everything we’ve talked about has happened before. Algorithmic progress already doubles every year or so. So it’s not insane to think that algorithmic progress can contribute to these compute things. In terms of general speedup, we’re already at like a thousand times research speedup, multiplier compared to the Paleolithic or something. So from the point of view of anyone in most of history, we are going at a blindingly insane pace. And all that we’re saying here is that it’s not going to stop. The same trend that has caused us to have a thousand times speed up multiplier relative to past eras and not even the Paleolithic, like what happened in the century between, I don’t know, 600 and 700 A. D. I'm sure there are things, I’m sure historians could point them out. Then you look at the century between 1900 and 2000 and it’s just completely qualitatively different. Of course there are models of whether that stagnated recently or what’s going on here. We can talk about those, we can talk about why we expect the intelligence explosion to be an antidote to that kind of stagnation. But nothing we’re saying is that different from what has already happened. I mean, you are saying that these previous transitions have been smoother than the one you were anticipating.…

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