“There are also other reasons why an AI might show a sudden huge leap in intelligence. The species Homo sapiens showed a sharp jump in the effectiveness of intelligence, as the result of natural selection exerting a more-or-less steady optimization pressure on hominids for millions of years, gradually expanding the brain and prefrontal cortex, tweaking the software architecture. A few tens of thousands of years ago, hominid intelligence crossed some key threshold and made a huge leap in real-world effectiveness; we went from caves to skyscrapers in the blink of an evolutionary eye”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI as a pos neg factor, around 2006
“The underlying brain architecture was also continuous — our cranial capacity didn’t suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude. So it might be that, even if the AI is being elaborated from outside by human programmers, the curve for effective intelligence will jump sharply.”
“There are also other reasons why an AI might show a sudden huge leap in intelligence. The species Homo sapiens showed a sharp jump in the effectiveness of intelligence, as the result of natural selection exerting a more-or-less steady optimization pressure on hominids for millions of years, gradually expanding the brain and prefrontal cortex, tweaking the software architecture. A few tens of thousands of years ago, hominid intelligence crossed some key threshold and made a huge leap in real-world effectiveness; we went from caves to skyscrapers in the blink of an evolutionary eye”
Eliezer Yudkowsky, AI as a pos neg factor, around 2006
Optional extra sentences:
“The underlying brain architecture was also continuous — our cranial capacity didn’t suddenly increase by two orders of magnitude. So it might be that, even if the AI is being elaborated from outside by human programmers, the curve for effective intelligence will jump sharply.”