gwern comments on A Parable of Elites and Takeoffs - Less Wrong
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Other technologies have sparked arms races, so that seems like an odd position to take.
If you're a 'fast takeoff' proponent, I suppose the parallels to nukes aren't of much value and you don't care whether the politicians would handle well or poorly a slow takeoff. I don't find fast takeoffs all that plausible, so these are relevant matters to me and many other people interested in AI safety.
Eh.. timescales are relative here. Typically when someone around here says “fast takeoff” I assume they mean something along the lines of That Alien Message -- hard takeoff on the order of a literal blink of an eye, which is pure sci-fi bunk. But I find the other extreme parroted by Luke Muehlhauser and Stuart Armstrong and others -- 50 to 100 years -- equally bogus. From the weak inside view my best predictions put the entire project on the order of 1-2 decades, and the critical "takeoff" period measured in months or a few years, depending on the underlying architecture. That's not what most people around here mean by a "fast takeoff", but it is still too fast for meaningful political reaction.