To your first objection, I agree that "the gradient may not be the same in the two," when you are talking about chimp-to-human growth and human-to-superintelligence growth. But Eliezer's stated reason mostly applies to the areas near human intelligence, as I said. There is no consensus on how far the "steep" area extends, so I think your doubt is justified.
Your second objection also sounds reasonable to me, but I don't know enough about evolution to confidently endorse or dispute it. To me, this sounds similar to a point that Tim Tyler tries to make repeatedly in this sequence, but I haven't investigated his views thoroughly. I believe his stance is as follows: since a human selects a mate using their brain, and intelligence is so necessary for human survival, and sexual organisms want to pick fit mates, there has been a nontrivial feedback loop caused by humans using their intelligence to be good at selecting intelligent mates. Do you endorse this? (I am not sure, myself.)
Today's post, AI Go Foom was originally published on November 19, 2008. A summary:
Discuss the post here (rather than in the comments to the original post).
This post is part of the Rerunning the Sequences series, where we'll be going through Eliezer Yudkowsky's old posts in order so that people who are interested can (re-)read and discuss them. The previous post was Whence Your Abstractions?, and you can use the sequence_reruns tag or rss feed to follow the rest of the series.
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