Blaise Agüera y Arcas: belief

Transcript context

…Because I suppose that the thesis of Eliezer is that it is possible to have artifacts which are dramatically more intelligent than than we are. Maybe you think there's some kind of a limit, but but do you think in principle that we could build artifacts which are significantly more intelligent? Well, I think that collective humanity is already vastly more intelligent than individual humans. So in that side, you know, and and in many cases operates at very different time scales, for instance. I think these things are already true. Now, you know, the the ideas about so in in in a sense in a sense, our difference, our biggest difference is about thinking about it as an other versus as already a part of ourselves. You know, what do we even mean by human? There was a wonderful paper from 2006 called the science of psychology in which I'm not remembering her name, but she's a psychologist and the science of psychology is called CYC. She asks people to draw bicycles. You know, first to say, do you know how a bicycle works? Everybody says, yeah, of course, know how a bicycle works. Okay. Draw 1. Nobody can draw it. Even if it's just, you know, looking at a sketch of a bicycle and say, okay, where does the chain go? You know, or where are the pedals? Most people don't know. You know, they make some very fundamental error in this. And, you know, it's a it's a very funny it's a very funny paper, but, you know, the point is we all have these illusions about what our own knowledge is, our own capabilities, own intelligence are. We already have swing in the sense that we are I we identify what we think of as our intelligence with something that is actually in a bunch of other people and a bunch of other stuff around us, you know, and and and we do that kind of unconsciously. So for me, you know, there's there's not really a discontinuity between, you know, what we what's already going on and AI. It's it's really just more of that. Interesting. I think they would make the argument that you could build a single artifact which is more intelligent than the totality of humans. But just parking that to 1 side, I spoke with Judith Fan. She's a wonderful professor at Stanford. And she's done studies on drawing. So comparing how humans draw to computers using clip models and stuff like that. And she sound she found something fascinating, which is that because we have quite an abstract understanding. When we make sketches, you know, and she was kind of grading it on, you know, like, the progression 1, progression 2, progression 3. And we we kind of start very coarse and very abstract. And AI systems, they start with the edges and and the details.…

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