Douglas_Reay

How minimal is our intelligence?

Gwern suggested that, if it were possible for civilization to have developed when our species had a lower IQ, then we'd still be dealing with the same problems, but we'd have a lower IQ with which to tackle them. Or, to put it another way, it is unsurprising that living in a civilization has posed problems that our species finds difficult to tackle, because if we were capable of solving such problems easily, we'd probably also have been capable of developing civilization earlier than we did. How true is that? In this post I plan to look in detail at the origins of civilization with an eye to considering how much the timing of it did depend directly upon the IQ of our species, rather than upon other factors. Although we don't have precise IQ test numbers for our immediate ancestral species, the fossil record is good enough to give us a clear idea of how brain size has changed over time: and we do have archaeological evidence of approximately when various technologies (such as pictograms, or using fire to cook meat) became common. The First City About 6,000 years ago (4000 BCE), Ur was a thriving trading village on the flood plain near the mouth of the river Euphrates in what is now called southern Iraq and what historians call Sumeria. By 3000 BCE it was the heart of a city-state with a core built up populated area covering 37 acres, and would go on over the following thousand years to lead the Sumerian empire, raise a great brick Ziggurat to its patron moon goddess, and become the largest city in the world (65,000 people concentrated in 54 acres). It was eventually doomed by desertification and soil salination, caused by its own success (over-grazing and land clearing) but, by then, cities had spread throughout the fertile crescent of rivers at the intersection of the European, African and Asian land masses. Ur may not have been the first city, but it was the first one we know of that wasn't part of a false dawn - one whose culture and technologies di

78Nov 25, 2012

Douglas_Reay

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Douglas Reay graduated from Cambridge University (Trinity College) in 1994. He has since worked in the computing and educational sectors.

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Superalignment

OpenAI have announced the approach they intend to use, to ensure humans stay in control of AIs smarter than they are: Our goal is to build a roughly human-level automated alignment researcher. We can then use vast amounts of compute to scale our efforts, and iteratively align superintelligence. To align...

Nov 18, 2023-4

Believable Promises

8. Believable Promises Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: How valuable is it, for an AI to be able to believably pre-commit to carrying out a later action that won't, at that later time, benefit it? Links to...

Apr 16, 20185

Metamorphosis

7. Metamorphosis Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: Under what circumstances can an AI be trusted to negotiate in good faith an alteration to its core values? Links to all the articles in the series: 1. Optimum number...

Apr 12, 20182

Trustworthy Computing

6. Trustworthy Computing Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: How to use non-open-ended task programs to permit a computing environment in which AIs could trust each other enough to cooperate on ganging up on defectors sufficiently effectively that...

Apr 10, 20189

The advantage of not being open-ended

5. The advantage of not being open-ended Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: When setting a computer a task, there are advantages to defining the task in such a way that a finite budget of some resource (such...

Mar 18, 201811

Environments for killing AIs

4. Environments for killing AIs Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: Killing a rogue AI may be impossible in our current environment, but we can change that by changing the environment. Links to all the articles in the...

Mar 17, 20183

Defect or Cooperate

3. Defect or Cooperate Summary of entire Series: An alternative approach to designing Friendly Artificial Intelligence computer systems. Summary of this Article: If the risks from being punished for not cooperating are high enough, then even for some types of Paperclip Maximiser that don't care at all about human survival,...

Mar 16, 20184

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Douglas_Reay

Douglas_Reay

Douglas_Reay

How minimal is our intelligence?

Examine your assumptions

How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy

LiveJournal Memes

Douglas_Reay

Superalignment

Believable Promises

Metamorphosis

Trustworthy Computing

The advantage of not being open-ended

Environments for killing AIs

Defect or Cooperate

How minimal is our intelligence?

Examine your assumptions

How to deal with someone in a LessWrong meeting being creepy

LiveJournal Memes

Superalignment

Believable Promises

Metamorphosis

Trustworthy Computing

The advantage of not being open-ended

Environments for killing AIs

Defect or Cooperate