Dwarkesh Patel: prediction

Transcript context

…I’m a little bit suspicious, I would have to take a look. For example, some of the logs are not very good from before the Industrial Revolution. I’m a bit suspicious of it but I don’t have strong opinions. You’re saying that this was a singular event that was extremely magical. You’re saying that maybe there’s going to be another event that’s going to be just like that, extremely magical. It will break the paradigm, and so on. I actually don’t think… The crucial thing with the Industrial Revolution was that it was not magical. If you just zoomed in, what you would see in 1770 or 1870 is not that there was some key invention. But at the same time, you did move the economy to a regime where the progress was much faster and the exponential 10x’d. I expect a similar thing from AI where it’s not like there’s going to be a single moment where we’ve made the crucial invention. It’s an overhang that’s being unlocked. Like maybe there’s a new energy source. There’s some unlock—in this case, some kind of a cognitive capacity—and there’s an overhang of cognitive work to do.…

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