Did the ancient Greeks even have a concept of humans as varying over time? Certainly they didn't have a single machine which did anything even remotely like thinking.
I quite clearly remember growing up in a universe which was static. People even talked about mechanisms to create hyrdrogen in deep space in order to keep the density constant in light of the Hubble expansion. I REMEMBER seeing the big bang theory (not the TV show!) and just marveling at the audacity. How could the universe have started? What was here before?
And quite similarly I remember thinking there is "history" and there is "now." History had things like WWII and the bubonic plague in it, now had civil rights, the Soviet Union, and the Vietnam War. I was probably in my 30s when I finally realized that 1) we ARE in hisotry and 2) it ain't slowing down, if anything its speeding up.
When I put myself in the place of the greeks, humans would seem static, human culture would seem largely static, machines would seem darn near irrelevant to anything.
I can't imagine I could look forward to an intelligence explosion until I had some sense that looking backward there had been an intelligence explosion. Even now you can talk to Rabbis who will argue with you about evolution by asking you if you really believe you are descended from a monkey. Did ANYONE in ancient greece have any idea that we had any other relation to monkeys or horses or dogs other than sharing the planet with them?
Yes, the atomists did believe that the world changed, that the time of humans was a transient epoch in the history of the universe. Lucretius talked specifically about this. We don't have any direct access to Greek atomists, but Lucretius seems to be copying Greek sources.
Also see: History of the Friendly AI concept.
The ancient atomists reasoned their way from first principles to materialism and atomic theory before Socrates began his life's work of making people look stupid in the marketplace of Athens. Why didn't they discover natural selection, too? After all, natural selection follows necessarily from heritability, variation, and selection, and the Greeks had plenty of evidence for all three pieces. Natural selection is obvious once you understand it, but it took us a long time to discover it.
I get the same vibe from intelligence explosion. The hypothesis wasn't stated clearly until 1965, but in hindsight it seems obvious. (Michael Vassar once told me that once he became a physicalist he said "Oh! Intelligence explosion!" Except of course he didn't know the term "intelligence explosion." And he was probably exaggerating.)
Intelligence explosion follows from physicalism and scientific progress and not much else. Since materialists had to believe that human intelligence resulted from the operation of mechanical systems located in the human body, they could have realized that scientists would eventually come to understand these systems so long as scientific progress continued. (Herophilos and Erasistratus were already mapping which nerves and veins did what back in the 4th century B.C.)
And once human intelligence is understood, it can be improved upon, and this improvement in intelligence can be used to improve intelligence even further. And the ancient Greeks certainly had good evidence that there was plenty of room above us when it came to intelligence.
The major hang-up for predicting intelligence explosion may have been the the inability to imagine that this intelligence-engineering could leave the limitations of the human skull and move to a speedier, more dependable and scalable substrate. And that's why Good's paper had to wait until the age of the computer.
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