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ciphergoth comments on Superintelligence Reading Group - Section 1: Past Developments and Present Capabilities - Less Wrong
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Without the benefit of hindsight, which past technologies would you have expected to make a big difference to human productivity? For an example, if you think that humans' tendency to share information through language is hugely important to their success, then you might expect the printing press to help a lot, or the internet.
Relatedly, if you hadn't already been told, would you have expected agriculture to be a bigger deal than almost anything else?
I don't understand this question!
Sorry! I edited it - tell me if it still isn't clear.
Please, Madam Editor: "Without the benefit of hindsight," what technologies could you possibly expect?
The question should perhaps be, What technology development made the greatest productive difference? Agriculture? IT? Et alia? "Agriculture" if your top appreciation is for quantity of people, which admittedly subsumes a lot; IT if it's for positive feedback in ideas. Electrification? That's the one I'd most hate to lose.
I'm afraid I'm still confused. Maybe it would help if you could make explicit the connection between this question and the underlying question you're hoping to shed light on!
In case it helps, here is what I believe to be a paraphrase of the question.
"Consider technological developments in the past. Which of them, if you'd been looking at it at the time without knowing what's actually come of it, would you have predicted to make a big difference?"
And my guess at what underlies it:
"We are trying to evaluate the likely consequences of AI without foreknowledge. It might be useful to have an idea of how well our predictions match up to reality. So let's try to work out what our predictions would have been for some now-established technologies, and see how they compare with how they actually turned out."
To reduce bias one should select the past technologies in a way that doesn't favour ones that actually turned out to be important. That seems difficult, but then so does evaluating them while suppressing what we actually know about what consequences they had...
Yes! That's what I meant. Thank you :)