It is true that a young human (usually) starts with a ton of cultural knowledge that a young chimp doesn't have.
It is also true that if you would try giving the cultural knowledge to the young chimp, they wouldn't be able to process it.
Therefore, culture is important, but the genetic adaptation that makes culture possible is also important.
If the AI would get the ability to use human culture, after connecting to internet it would be able to use the human culture just like humans; maybe even better, because humans are usually limited to a few cultures and subcultures, while a sufficiently powerful AI could use them all.
Also, culture is essentially important because humans are mortal, and live relatively shortly compared with how much information they have available. (Imagine that you are an immortal vampire with perfect memory; how many years would it take you to become an expert at everything humans know and do, assuming that the rest of humankind remains frozen in the state of 2016?) Thus culture is the only way to go beyond the capacity of the individual. Also, some experiments get you killed, and culture is a way to get this knowledge. The AI with sufficiently great memory and processing speed would have less need for culture than humans do.
I've been going through the AIFoom debate, and both sides makes sense to me. I intend to continue, but I'm wondering if there're already insights in LW culture I can get if I just ask for them.
My understanding is as follows:
The difference between a chimp and a human is only 5 million years of evolution. That's not time enough for many changes.
Eliezer takes this as proof that the difference between the two in the brain architecture can't be much. Thus, you can have a chimp-intelligent AI that doesn't do much, and then with some very small changes, suddenly get a human-intelligent AI and FOOM!
Robin takes the 5-million year gap as proof that the significant difference between chimps and humans is only partly in the brain architecture. Evolution simply can't be responsible for most of the relevant difference; the difference must be elsewhere.
So he concludes that when our ancestors got smart enough for language, culture became a thing. Our species stumbled across various little insights into life, and these got passed on. An increasingly massive base of cultural content, made of very many small improvements is largely responsible for the difference between chimps and humans.
Culture assimilated new information into humans much faster than evolution could.
So he concludes that you can get a chimp-level AI, and to get up to human-level will take, not a very few insights, but a very great many, each one slowly improving the computer's intelligence. So no Foom, it'll be a gradual thing.
So I think I've figured out the question. Is there a commonly known answer, or are there insights towards the same?