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SilentCal comments on Superintelligence 8: Cognitive superpowers - Less Wrong
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This does seem like the most important, but it's not necessarily the only superpower that would suffice for takeoff. Superpower-level social manipulation could be used to get human AI researchers to help. Alternatively, lots of funds plus human-comparable social manipulation could likely achieve this; economic productivity or hacking could be used to attain lots of funds. With some basic ability to navigate the economy, technology research would imply economic productivity.
The above could all be done with basic-human-level strategy. I'm not sure what superpower-level strategy would look like unless it turned into superpower-level skill at more specific domains.
I can't quite imagine what that could possibly look like.
Sort of like this.
Given the actual outcome of all the Soviet Union's "social manipulation", I am not sure that it's extendable to the superpower levels :-/
What do you consider that outcome to be? True, they failed to win the cold war, but they deed succeed in injecting a destructive memeplex into Western culture that is currently taking over.
Pretty much nothing.
I am not sure which "destructive memeplex" do you have in mind, but I suspect that it came from and spread through prominent Western figures.
Derren Brown looks like he's engaging in superpower-level social manipulation but in general those things are hard to judge from the outside.
No, he's doing magic tricks.
For a fictional example on the Batman rather than Superman level of superpower, Miles Vorkosigan in Bujold's The Warrior's Apprentice. Everyone he runs into becomes a component of his schemes.
At the non-superpower levels, many successful political orators (and demagogues) would qualify.
And another fictional example would be Aes Sedai from the Wheel of Time series.
I would imagine it as the ability to examine a reasonable amount of information on an individual (probably internet activity and possibly video surveillance) and determine what, if anything, you could tell them that would persuade them to do what you want them to. The AI box experiment is probably the canonical example. Exactly how much you could convince how many people to do is debatable; is that what you mean by saying you can't imagine this?
I misunderstood you, then -- what you described I wouldn't call social manipulation. It's just figuring out the individual's pain and pleasure points and then applying the proper amount of pressure to them -- nothing social about that.
Whether I can imagine an AI having superpower-level psychological manipulation abilities (but NOT superintelligent at the same time), I'm not sure. On the one hand, you could probably call it a narrow AI, on the other hand it might be that the superpowered ability to manipulate humans does require enough AGI-nature so that the AI is essentially an AGI.