= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Wei_Dai comments on Modest Superintelligences - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (88)
My intuition says that if we took the 10000 most intelligent people in the world, put them together and told them to work on some technical project, that would be much less effective than if we could make 10000 copies of the most intelligent person, in part because the 10000th most intelligent person is much less productive than the 1st. As evidence for this, I note that there are very few people whose "known for" list on Wikipedia is nearly as long as von Neumann's, and you'd expect more such people if the productivity difference between the 1st and the 10000th weren't very large.
But if it turns out that I'm wrong, and it's not worth doing the cloning step, then I'd be happy with a "MSI-0.9" that just gathers 10000 top people and sets them to work on MSI-2 (or whatever technologies appears most important to getting a positive Singularity).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Leonhard_Euler
"Mathematical historian Eric Temple Bell estimated that, had Gauss published all of his discoveries in a timely manner, he would have advanced mathematics by fifty years"; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_Carl_Friedrich_Gauss
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Lists_of_things_named_after_mathematicians
(This isn't to contradict your point, just provide relevant evidence.)
I agree that von Neumann was exceptional.
I am not sure a Wikipedia rap sheet is as good a proxy for genius as you claim. I think genius is necessary but not sufficient. I also think "recreating von Neumann" will require context not present in his DNA. There are also issues with parallelizing intellectual work detailed in "the mythical man month," I am sure you are aware of.
At any rate, instead of trying for MSI-1, which has huge technical obstacles to overcome, why not simply push to acquire financial resources and hire brilliant people to do the work you think is necessary. That is doable with today's tech, and today's people.
[comment from the heart, rather than from the head: your description of MSI-1 sounds kind of, well, totalitarian. Don't you think that's a little peculiar?]
The point is to obtain an insurmountable lead on WBE tech, otherwise you'll just spur competition and probably end up with Robin Hanson's Malthusian scenario. (If intelligence explosion were possible, you could win the WBE race by a small margin and translate that into a big win, but for this post I'm assuming that intelligence explosion isn't possible, so you need to win the race by a large margin.)
In that case you're in for a surprise when you find out what I was referring to by "WBE-enabled institutional controls" for MSI-2. Read Carl Shulman's Whole Brain Emulation and the Evolution of Superorganisms.
Since exploiting intelligence explosion still requires FAI, and FAI could be very difficult, you might still need a large enough margin to perform all the necessary FAI research before your competition stumbles on an AGI.