Unlike programmed AIs, corporations cannot FOOM. This leaves them with limited intelligence and power, heavily constrained by other corporations, government, and consumers.
The corporations that have come the closest to FOOMing are known as monopolies, and they tend to be among the least friendly.
Is this obvious? True, the timescale is not seconds, hours, or even days. But corporations do change their inner workings, and they have also been known to change the way they change their inner workings. I suggest that if a corporation of today were dropped into the 1950s, and operated on 1950s technology but with modern technique, it would rapidly outmaneuver its downtime competitors; and that the same would be true for any gap of fifty years, back to the invention of the corporation in the Middle Ages.
I am suggesting that a ten-year recursion time is fast. I don’t know where you got your million years; what corporations have been around for a million years?
This is true, but not relevant to whether we can use what we know about corporations and their values to infer things about AIs and their values.
It is relevant. It means you can infer a whole lot less about what capabilities an AI have and also about how much effort an AI will likely spend on self improvement early on. The payoffs and optimal investment strategy for resources are entirely different.
Unlike programmed AIs, corporations cannot FOOM. This leaves them with limited intelligence and power, heavily constrained by other corporations, government, and consumers.
The corporations that have come the closest to FOOMing are known as monopolies, and they tend to be among the least friendly.
Is this obvious? True, the timescale is not seconds, hours, or even days. But corporations do change their inner workings, and they have also been known to change the way they change their inner workings. I suggest that if a corporation of today were dropped into the 1950s, and operated on 1950s technology but with modern technique, it would rapidly outmaneuver its downtime competitors; and that the same would be true for any gap of fifty years, back to the invention of the corporation in the Middle Ages.
I suggest it is—for anything but the most crippled definition of “FOOM”.
Right, FOOM by its onomatopoeic nature suggest a fast recursion, not a million-year-long one.
I am suggesting that a ten-year recursion time is fast. I don’t know where you got your million years; what corporations have been around for a million years?
I’m inclined to agree—there are pressures in a corporation to slow improvement rather than to accelerate it.
Any organization which could beat that would be extremely impressive but rather hard to imagine.
This is true, but not relevant to whether we can use what we know about corporations and their values to infer things about AIs and their values.
It is relevant. It means you can infer a whole lot less about what capabilities an AI have and also about how much effort an AI will likely spend on self improvement early on. The payoffs and optimal investment strategy for resources are entirely different.