Daniel Kokotajlo: prediction

Transcript context

…Yeah, it’s so hard to reason about because if Constantine or somebody in 400, 500 was like, “I want the Roman Empire to have the Industrial Revolution”, and somehow he figured out that you need mechanized machines to do that. And he’s like, “let’s mechanize”. It’s like, “what’s the next step?” It’s like, “dude, that’s a lot”. Yeah, I like that analogy a lot, actually. I think it’s not perfect, but it’s a decent analogy. Imagine if a bunch of us got sent back in time to the Roman Empire, such that we don’t have the actual hands-on know-how to actually build the technology and make the Industrial revolution happen. But we have the high-level picture, the strategic vision of, we’re going to make these machines and then we’re going to have an industrial revolution. I think that’s kind of analogous to the situation with the superintelligences where they have the high-level picture of, here’s how we’re going to improve in all these dimensions, we’re going to learn by doing, we’re going to get to this level of technology, et cetera. But maybe they at least initially lack the actual know how. So, there’s this question of, if we did the back in time to the Roman Empire thing, how soon could we bring up the Industrial revolution? Without people going back in time it took 2,000 years for the Industrial Revolution. Could we get it to happen in 200 years? That’s a 10x speedup. Could we get it to happen in 20 years? That’s 100x speed up? I don’t know. But this seems like a somewhat relevant analogy to what’s going on with those superintelligences. And we haven’t really got into this because you’re using the quote-unquote more conservative vision where it’s not like godlike intelligence, we’re still using the conceptual handles we would have for humans. But I think I would rather have humans go back with their big picture understanding of what has happened over the last 2000 years. Like me having seen everything, rather than a superintelligence who knows nothing. But it’s just in the Roman economy and they’re like 1000x this economy somehow. I think just knowing generally how things took off, knowing basically steam engine, dot dot dot, railroads, blah, blah, blah, is more valuable than a super intelligence.…

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