Dwarkesh Patel: uncertainty

Transcript context

…Given some effort to improve the transfer and blah, blah, blah, blah. But even if there’s not, what you’re suggesting is: if you wanted to transform the world of the 18th century, you might care about how well you can navigate Westminster or something. But another thing you might care about is: “Can you just immediately start building steamships and fucking telegraph and the Maxim gun and whatever?” If you could get really good at that, you could be a fucking super transformative thing in the 18th century. You don’t necessarily need to be amazing at trying to convince King Henry of some bullshit. I’m so fucking up my medieval history. I’m guessing that Henry was not king at this time. But anyway, that’s your point. So you’re suggesting that at this time, AI companies are also working on robotics progress, which is very commingled with AI research progress. So if you can build more robots, if those robots have better AIs operating them that are human level… Human-level teleoperation is actually pretty good on robots. We just don’t have human-level robotics models yet. So you’re suggesting if we do that — if the AIs get really good at the verifiable stuff in chip design, et cetera, and then they get really good at building fabs — it’ll be the equivalent of going back to the 18th century and saying, “Okay, I don’t know what you guys are talking about in your parliament, but I’ve got a bunch of steamships and a bunch of Maxim guns. ” Yeah, that’s basically right. My perspective is that if AIs are sufficiently good at R&D, including hardware R&D, robots, whatever, then they can radically transform the world, even if they’re not that good at playing politics. Also, we’re in a pretty dangerous situation, because the AIs might be doing huge amounts of really hard-to-understand R&D, building out basically the whole economy of the future, and we may not understand what’s going on in there.…

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