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JoshuaZ comments on Why an Intelligence Explosion might be a Low-Priority Global Risk - Less Wrong
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It might ramp up with increasing the number of scientists, but there are clear diminishing marginal returns. There are more scientists today at some major research universities than there were at any point in the 19th century. Yet we don't have people constantly coming up with ideas as big as say evolution or Maxwell's equations. The low hanging fruit gets picked quickly.
I agree that Mahoney's work isn't so far very impressive. The models used are simplistic and weak.
Many forms of induction are NP-hard and some versions are NP-complete so these sorts of limits are clearly relevant. Some other forms are closely related where one models things in terms of recognizing pseudorandom number generators. But it seems to me to be incorrect to identify this as the only issue or even that it is necessarily more important.. If for example one could factor large numbers more efficiently, an AI could do a lot with that if it got minimal internet access.
You are far more knowledgeable than me and a lot better at expressing possible problems with an intelligence explosion.
Since the very beginning I wondered why nobody has written down what speaks against that possibility. Which is one of the reasons for why I even bothered to start arguing against it myself -- the trigger has been a deletion of a certain post which made me realize that there is a lot more to it (socially and psychologically) than the average research project -- even though I knew very well that I don't have the necessary background, nor patience, to do so in a precise and elaborated manner.
Do people think that a skeptical inquiry of, and counterarguments against an intelligence explosion are not valuable?
I don't know about that. The primary issue I've talked about limiting an intelligence explosion is computational complexity issues. That's a necessarily technical area. Moreover, almost all the major boundaries are conjectural. If P=NP in a practical way, than an intelligence explosion may be quite easy. There's also a major danger that in thinking/arguing that this is relevant, I may be engaging in motivated cognition in that there's an obvious bias to thinking that things close to one's own field are somehow relevant.
Perhaps eventually - but much depends on how you measure it. In dollar terms, scientists are doing fairly well - there are a lot of them and they command reasonable salaries. They may not be Newtons of Einsteins, but society still seems to be prepared to pay them in considerable numbers at the moment. I figure that means there is still important stuff that needs discovering.
As Eray Özkural once said: "Every algorithm encodes a bit of intelligence". However, some algorithms do more so than others. A powerful inductive inference engine could be used to solve factoring problems - but also, a huge number of other problems.