I’m not talking about recursive self-improvement. That’s one way to take a sharp left turn, and it could happen, but note that humans have neither the understanding nor control over their own minds to recursively self-improve, and we outstrip the rest of the animals pretty handily. I’m talking about something more like “intelligence that is general enough to be dangerous”, the sort of thing that humans have and chimps don’t.
Individual humans can’t FOOM (at lest not yet), but humanity did.
My best guess is that humanity took a sharp left turn when we got a general enough language, and then again when we got writing, and possibly again when the skill of reading an writing spread to a majority of the population.
Before language human intelligence was basically limited to what a single brain could do. When we got language we got the ability of adding compute (more humans) to the same problem solving task. Humanity got parallel computing. This extra capabilities could be used to invent things to increase the population, i.e. recusing self improvement.
Later, writing gave us external memory. Before our computations where limited by human memory, but now we could start to fill up libraries, unlocking a new level of recursive self improvement.
Every increase in literacy and communication technology (e.g. the internet) is humanity upgrading its capability.
Individual humans can’t FOOM (at lest not yet), but humanity did.
My best guess is that humanity took a sharp left turn when we got a general enough language, and then again when we got writing, and possibly again when the skill of reading an writing spread to a majority of the population.
Before language human intelligence was basically limited to what a single brain could do. When we got language we got the ability of adding compute (more humans) to the same problem solving task. Humanity got parallel computing. This extra capabilities could be used to invent things to increase the population, i.e. recusing self improvement.
Later, writing gave us external memory. Before our computations where limited by human memory, but now we could start to fill up libraries, unlocking a new level of recursive self improvement.
Every increase in literacy and communication technology (e.g. the internet) is humanity upgrading its capability.