timtyler comments on Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011 - Less Wrong

14 Post author: XiXiDu 03 July 2011 04:59PM

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Comment author: timtyler 04 July 2011 12:46:36AM *  2 points [-]

OK - so we have to understand that being first in the tech industry isn't what is important. Often first movers get overtaken by second movers who go on to rise to power - e.g. AltaVista, Friendster, etc. Being early is important, but being first isn't necessarily enough.

This is a pretty well-established pattern. So, yes, strictly it is "early movers" that the discussion should be about. We could discuss "first movers" - but that fails to nail the main phenomenon of interest here very well, IMO.

Comment author: [deleted] 04 July 2011 12:57:20AM 4 points [-]

There's something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.

It seems that:

  1. The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
  2. The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans

I don't know how to interpret the evidence from the industrial revolution, and I don't really see a pattern. But I think the place to look for a pattern is here, not in recent tech industry history.

Comment author: asr 04 July 2011 02:22:35PM *  4 points [-]

The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.

I am not so confident of this. There were a bunch of early hominids, other than H. Sap, whose intelligence is not well established. Suppose, say, it turns out that Neanderthals were 7% smarter on average than modern humans, but lost out evolutionarily because they had too much body hair. What would that imply about the importance of intelligence?

Comment author: Vaniver 05 July 2011 03:27:48AM 0 points [-]

Actually, we have strong reason to suspect Neanderthals were smarter than Cro-Magnon man, and lost out because Cro-Magnon man traded and Neanderthals didn't.

Comment author: timtyler 04 July 2011 06:56:13AM *  1 point [-]

There's something more basic about the analogy I object to. Google, Friendster, Altavista and Facebook were not founded at the beginning of a singularity.

What do you mean by that? You think Google isn't going to go on to develop machine intelligence? Surely they are among the front runners - though admittedly there are some other players in the game. This is not a case of hanging around for some future event.

  • The first creatures to develop human-level intelligence came to dominate all other creatures.
  • The first humans to develop agriculture did not come to dominate all other humans

The wording of the question was:

Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world.

It doesn't say the control is kept indefinitely. So - for instance - Sergey and Larry might die - but they will still have quickly come to control a larger fraction of the world than any farmer or industrialist.

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