Dwarkesh Patel: belief

Transcript context

…I think we’ve had a few. I think we’re getting to that part of the conversation, and then you can help me get my foot out of my mouth and figure out a more concrete way to think about it. To your point that there was the Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, and now there’s AI, and each might be a different pace or a different way in which science happens. If you think about the pace of how fast such transitions have been happening, you can draw over the long span of human history this hyperbolic rate of growth that is increasing over time as well. A hundred thousand years ago, you had the Stone Age. You go back even much further, how long have primates been around? It would be millions of years. A hundred thousand years ago, the Stone Age, then ten thousand years ago, the Agricultural Revolution, then three hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution, each marked by this increase in the rate of exponential growth. Then people think it’s going to happen again with AI. But that would happen potentially even faster. It would not have occurred to somebody at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution that the next demarcation in this trend will be artificial intelligence. So if things are getting faster, and it’s hard to anticipate what the next transition will be. I guess we just think of this singularity between now and AI as what distinguishes the past from the future. But applying the same heuristic that many people in the past should have had, maybe the “Intelligence Age” is also quite short and the next thing after that, we don’t even have the ontology to describe what it is, the future will not think of the past as pre-intelligent AI and post-AI. No, obviously we can’t prove this, but it certainly seems quite plausible. Part of the issue is just that the substrate we have available to conceive seems all wrong. You can’t speculate with a bunch of chimpanzees about what it would be to have language. Just to pick a major transition in the past, the transition itself is the thing. It seems likely. If we’re talking about “taking a puff” kind of thoughts, I’m certainly amused by the idea that there’s going to be some transition involving artificial general intelligence using classical computers. But actually, there’ll be an interesting transition with quantum computers as well. They’re probably capable of a strictly larger class of potentially interesting computations. So maybe the character of AQGI, or whatever it should be called, is actually qualitatively different. So maybe there’s a brief period between those two things. As I say, this is just speculation, but it’s certainly amusing.…

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