Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

XiXiDu

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

On Wednesday I debated my ex-co-blogger Eliezer Yudkowsky at a private Jane Street Capital event (crude audio here, from 4:45; better video here [as of July 14]).

I “won” in the sense of gaining more audience votes — the vote was 45-40 (him to me) before, and 32-33 after the debate. That makes me two for two, after my similar “win” over Bryan Caplan (42-10 before, 25-20 after). This probably says little about me, however, since contrarians usually “win” such debates.

Our topic was: Compared to the farming and industrial revolutions, intelligence explosion first-movers will quickly control a much larger fraction of their new world. He was pro, I was con. We also debated this subject here on Overcoming Bias from June to December 2008. Let me now try to summarize my current position.

[...]

It thus seems quite unlikely that one AI team could find an architectural innovation powerful enough to let it go from tiny to taking over the world within a few weeks.

Link: overcomingbias.com/2011/07/debating-yudkowsky.html

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.

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:

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

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.

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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Hanson Debating Yudkowsky, Jun 2011

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