Not sure I understand your question. If you mean just what I think is the case about FOOM:
Obviously, there’s no strong reason humans will stay coupled with an AGI. The AGI’s thoughts will be highly alien—that’s kinda the point.
Obviously, new ways of thinking recursively beget powerful new ways of thinking. This is obvious from the history of thinking and from introspection. And obviously this goes faster and faster. And obviously will go much faster in an AGI.
Therefore, from our perspective, there will be a fast-and-sharp FOOM.
But I don’t really know what to think about Christiano-slow takeoff.
I.e. a 4-year GDP doubling before a 1-year GDP doubling.
I think Christiano agrees that there will later be a sharp/fast/discontinuous(??) FOOM, but he thinks things will get really weird and fast before that point. To me this is vaguely in the genre of trying to predict whether you can usefully get nuclear power out of a pile without setting off a massive explosion, when you’ve only heard conceptually about the idea of nuclear decay. But I imagine Christiano actually did some BOTECs to get the numbers “4” and “1″.
If I were to guess at where I’d disagree with Christiano: Maybe he thinks that in the slow part of the slow takeoff, humans can make a bunch of progress on aligning / interfacing with / getting work out of AI stuff, to such an extent that from those future humans’s perspectives, the fast part of the slow takeoff will actually be slow, in the relative sense. In other words, if the fast part came today, it would be fast, but if it came later, it would be slow, because we’d be able to keep up. Whereas I think aligning/interfacing, in the part where it counts, is crazy hard, and doesn’t especially have to be coupled with nascent-AGI-driven capabilities advances. A lot of Christiano’s work has (explicitly) a strategy-stealing flavor: if capability X exists, then we / an aligned thingy should be able to steal the way to do X and do it alignedly. If you think you can do that, then it makes sense to think that our understanding will be coupled with AGI’s understanding.
I meant ‘do you think it’s good, bad, or neutral that people use the phrase ‘slow’/‘fast’ takeoff? And, if bad, what do you wish people did instead in those sentences?
Depends on context; I guess by raw biomass, it’s bad because those phrases would probably indicate that people aren’t really thinking and they should taboo those phrases and ask why they wanted to discuss them? But if that’s the case and they haven’t already done that, maybe there’s a more important underlying problem, such as Sinclair’s razor.
Not sure I understand your question. If you mean just what I think is the case about FOOM:
Obviously, there’s no strong reason humans will stay coupled with an AGI. The AGI’s thoughts will be highly alien—that’s kinda the point.
Obviously, new ways of thinking recursively beget powerful new ways of thinking. This is obvious from the history of thinking and from introspection. And obviously this goes faster and faster. And obviously will go much faster in an AGI.
Therefore, from our perspective, there will be a fast-and-sharp FOOM.
But I don’t really know what to think about Christiano-slow takeoff.
I.e. a 4-year GDP doubling before a 1-year GDP doubling.
I think Christiano agrees that there will later be a sharp/fast/discontinuous(??) FOOM, but he thinks things will get really weird and fast before that point. To me this is vaguely in the genre of trying to predict whether you can usefully get nuclear power out of a pile without setting off a massive explosion, when you’ve only heard conceptually about the idea of nuclear decay. But I imagine Christiano actually did some BOTECs to get the numbers “4” and “1″.
If I were to guess at where I’d disagree with Christiano: Maybe he thinks that in the slow part of the slow takeoff, humans can make a bunch of progress on aligning / interfacing with / getting work out of AI stuff, to such an extent that from those future humans’s perspectives, the fast part of the slow takeoff will actually be slow, in the relative sense. In other words, if the fast part came today, it would be fast, but if it came later, it would be slow, because we’d be able to keep up. Whereas I think aligning/interfacing, in the part where it counts, is crazy hard, and doesn’t especially have to be coupled with nascent-AGI-driven capabilities advances. A lot of Christiano’s work has (explicitly) a strategy-stealing flavor: if capability X exists, then we / an aligned thingy should be able to steal the way to do X and do it alignedly. If you think you can do that, then it makes sense to think that our understanding will be coupled with AGI’s understanding.
I meant ‘do you think it’s good, bad, or neutral that people use the phrase ‘slow’/‘fast’ takeoff? And, if bad, what do you wish people did instead in those sentences?
Depends on context; I guess by raw biomass, it’s bad because those phrases would probably indicate that people aren’t really thinking and they should taboo those phrases and ask why they wanted to discuss them? But if that’s the case and they haven’t already done that, maybe there’s a more important underlying problem, such as Sinclair’s razor.