Eliezer -- To a first approximation, the economy as a whole is massively, embarrassingly, parallel. It doesn't matter if you have a few very fast computers or lots of very slow computers. Processing is processing and it doesn't matter if it is centralized or distributed. Anecdotal evidence for this abounds. The Apollo program involved hundreds of thousands of distributed human scale intelligences. And that was just one program in a highly distributed economy. We're going to take artificial intelligences and throw them at a huge number of problems: bi...
Robin -- But Eliezer's basic question of whether the general models you propose are sufficient seems to remain an open question. For example, you suggest that simple jobs can be performed by simple computers leaving the complicated jobs to humans (at the current time). A more accurate view might be that employers spend insignificant amounts of money on computers (1% to 10% of the human's wages) in order to optimize the humans. Humans assisted by computers have highly accurate long term memories, and they are highly synchronized. New ideas developed by ... (read more)