The most basic argument is that it really doesn’t take a lot of material resources to be very smart. Human brains run on a few watts, and we have more than enough easily available material resources in our environment to build much much much bigger brains.
Then, it doesn’t seem like “access to material resources” is what distinguishes humanity’s success from other animals’ success. Sure seems like we pretty straightforwardly won by being smarter and better at coordinating.
Also, between groups of humans, it seems that development of better technologies has vastly outperformed access to more resources (i.e. having a machine gun doesn’t take very much materials, but easily allows you to win wars against less technologically advanced civilizations). Daniel Kokotajlo’s work has studied in-depth the effect that better technology seems to have had on conquerors when trying to conquer the americas.
Now, you might doubt the connection between intelligence and developing new technologies. To me, it seems really obvious that there are some properties of a mind that determine how good it is at developing new technologies, holding environmental factors constant. We’ve seen drastic differences between different societies and different species in this respect, so there clearly is some kind of property here. I don’t see how the environmental effects would dominate, given that most technologies we are developing just involve the use of existing components we already have (like, writing a new computer program that is better at doing something doesn’t require special new resources).
Now the risk is that you get an AI that is much better at solving problems and developing new technologies than humans. It seems that humans are really not great at it, and that the upper bound for competence is far above where we are. This makes both sense on priors (why would the first species to make use of extensive tool-making already be at the maximum), but also from an inside-view (human minds sure don’t seem very optimized for actually developing new technologies, given that we have a brain that only takes in a few watts, and have been mostly optimized for other constraints). I don’t care whether you call it intelligence, and it definitely shouldn’t be conflated with the concept of human intelligence. Like, humans are sometimes smarter in a very specific and narrow way and the variation between individuals humans is overall pretty minimal. When I talk about machine intelligence I mean a much broader set of potential ways to be better at thinking.
We’ve seen drastic differences between different societies and different species in this respect, so there clearly is some kind of property here
Is there?
Writing, agriculture, animal husbandry, similar styles of architecture and most modern inventions from flight to nuclear energy to antibiotics seem to have been developed in a convergent way given some environmental factors.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias. So I guess it may be that there’s no way to actually argue against or for either of the positions here, now that I think about it.
So thanks for your answer, it cleared a few things up for me, I think, when constructing this reply.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
I will note that the 10,000 years-old thing is hardly ruled out by “history”, more so by geology or physics, but point taken, even very little data and bad models of reality can lead to ruling out a lot of things with very high certainty.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
This is however the kind of area where I always find history doesn’t provide enough evidence, which is not to say this would help my point or harm yours. Just to say that I don’t have enough certainty that statements like the above have any meaning, and in order to claim what I’d have wanted (what I was asking the question about) I would have to make a similar claim regarding history.
In brief I’d want to argue with the above statement by pointing out:
Ongoing process since the ancient Greeks, with some interruptions. But most of the “important stuff” was figured out a long time ago (I’m fine living with Greek architecture, crop selection, heating, medicine and even logic and mathematics).
“Progress” bringing about issues that we solve and call “progress”, i.e. smallpox and the bubonic plague up until we “progressed” to cities that could make them problematic. On the whole there’s no indication lifespan or happiness has greatly increased, the increases in lifespan exist, but once you take away “locked up in a nursing home” as “life” and exclude “death of kids <1 year” (or, alternatively, if you want to claim kids <1 year are as precious as a fully developed conscious human, once you include abortions into our own death statistics)… we haven’t made a lot of “progress” really.
A “cause” being attributed to the burst of technology in some niches in the 20th century, instead of it just being viewed as “random chance”, i.e. the random chance of making the correct 2 or 3 breakthroughs at the same time.
And those 3 points are completely different threads that would dismantle the idea you present, but I’m just bringing them up as potential threads that would dismantle your idea. Overall I hold very little faith in them besides (3), I think your view of history is more correct. But there’s no experiment I can run to find out, no way I can collect further data, nothing stopping me from overfitting a model to agree with some subconscious bias I have.
In day to day life, if I believe something (e.g. neural networks are the best abstractions for generic machine learning) and I’m face with an issue (e.g. loads of customers are getting bad accuracy from my NN based solution) I can at least hope to be open minded enough to try other things and see that I might have been wrong (e.g. gradient tree boosting might be a better abstraction than NNs in many cases) or, failing to find a better working hypothesis that provides experimental evidence, I can know I don’t know (e.g. go bankrupt and never get investor money again because I squanderd it away).
With the study of history I don’t see how I can go through that process, I feel a siren call that says “I like this model of the world”, and I can fit historical evidence to it without much issue. And I have no way to properly weighting the evidence and ultimately no experimental proof that could increase or decrease my confidence in a significant way. No “skin in the game”, besides wanting to get a warm fuzzy feeling from my historical models.
But again, I think this is not to say that certain hyptohesis (e.g. the Greek invented a vaccum based steam engine) can’t be certainly discounted, and I think that in of itself can be quite useful, you are correct there.
The most basic argument is that it really doesn’t take a lot of material resources to be very smart. Human brains run on a few watts, and we have more than enough easily available material resources in our environment to build much much much bigger brains.
Then, it doesn’t seem like “access to material resources” is what distinguishes humanity’s success from other animals’ success. Sure seems like we pretty straightforwardly won by being smarter and better at coordinating.
Also, between groups of humans, it seems that development of better technologies has vastly outperformed access to more resources (i.e. having a machine gun doesn’t take very much materials, but easily allows you to win wars against less technologically advanced civilizations). Daniel Kokotajlo’s work has studied in-depth the effect that better technology seems to have had on conquerors when trying to conquer the americas.
Now, you might doubt the connection between intelligence and developing new technologies. To me, it seems really obvious that there are some properties of a mind that determine how good it is at developing new technologies, holding environmental factors constant. We’ve seen drastic differences between different societies and different species in this respect, so there clearly is some kind of property here. I don’t see how the environmental effects would dominate, given that most technologies we are developing just involve the use of existing components we already have (like, writing a new computer program that is better at doing something doesn’t require special new resources).
Now the risk is that you get an AI that is much better at solving problems and developing new technologies than humans. It seems that humans are really not great at it, and that the upper bound for competence is far above where we are. This makes both sense on priors (why would the first species to make use of extensive tool-making already be at the maximum), but also from an inside-view (human minds sure don’t seem very optimized for actually developing new technologies, given that we have a brain that only takes in a few watts, and have been mostly optimized for other constraints). I don’t care whether you call it intelligence, and it definitely shouldn’t be conflated with the concept of human intelligence. Like, humans are sometimes smarter in a very specific and narrow way and the variation between individuals humans is overall pretty minimal. When I talk about machine intelligence I mean a much broader set of potential ways to be better at thinking.
Is there?
Writing, agriculture, animal husbandry, similar styles of architecture and most modern inventions from flight to nuclear energy to antibiotics seem to have been developed in a convergent way given some environmental factors.
But I guess it boils down to a question of studying history, which ultimately has no good data and is only good for overfitting bias. So I guess it may be that there’s no way to actually argue against or for either of the positions here, now that I think about it.
So thanks for your answer, it cleared a few things up for me, I think, when constructing this reply.
What a weird statement. Of course history rules out 99.9% of hypotheses about how the world came to be. We can quibble over the remaining hypotheses, but obvious ones like “the world is 10000 years old” and “human populations levels reached 10 billion at some point in the past” are all easily falsified. Yes, there is some subjectivity in history, but overall, it still reduces the hypothesis space by many many orders of magnitude.
We know that many thousands of years of history never had anything like the speed of technological development as we had in the 20th century. There was clearly something that changed during that time. And population is not sufficient, since we had relatively stable population levels for many thousands of years before the beginning of the industrial revolution, and again before the beginning of agriculture.
I will note that the 10,000 years-old thing is hardly ruled out by “history”, more so by geology or physics, but point taken, even very little data and bad models of reality can lead to ruling out a lot of things with very high certainty.
This is however the kind of area where I always find history doesn’t provide enough evidence, which is not to say this would help my point or harm yours. Just to say that I don’t have enough certainty that statements like the above have any meaning, and in order to claim what I’d have wanted (what I was asking the question about) I would have to make a similar claim regarding history.
In brief I’d want to argue with the above statement by pointing out:
Ongoing process since the ancient Greeks, with some interruptions. But most of the “important stuff” was figured out a long time ago (I’m fine living with Greek architecture, crop selection, heating, medicine and even logic and mathematics).
“Progress” bringing about issues that we solve and call “progress”, i.e. smallpox and the bubonic plague up until we “progressed” to cities that could make them problematic. On the whole there’s no indication lifespan or happiness has greatly increased, the increases in lifespan exist, but once you take away “locked up in a nursing home” as “life” and exclude “death of kids <1 year” (or, alternatively, if you want to claim kids <1 year are as precious as a fully developed conscious human, once you include abortions into our own death statistics)… we haven’t made a lot of “progress” really.
A “cause” being attributed to the burst of technology in some niches in the 20th century, instead of it just being viewed as “random chance”, i.e. the random chance of making the correct 2 or 3 breakthroughs at the same time.
And those 3 points are completely different threads that would dismantle the idea you present, but I’m just bringing them up as potential threads that would dismantle your idea. Overall I hold very little faith in them besides (3), I think your view of history is more correct. But there’s no experiment I can run to find out, no way I can collect further data, nothing stopping me from overfitting a model to agree with some subconscious bias I have.
In day to day life, if I believe something (e.g. neural networks are the best abstractions for generic machine learning) and I’m face with an issue (e.g. loads of customers are getting bad accuracy from my NN based solution) I can at least hope to be open minded enough to try other things and see that I might have been wrong (e.g. gradient tree boosting might be a better abstraction than NNs in many cases) or, failing to find a better working hypothesis that provides experimental evidence, I can know I don’t know (e.g. go bankrupt and never get investor money again because I squanderd it away).
With the study of history I don’t see how I can go through that process, I feel a siren call that says “I like this model of the world”, and I can fit historical evidence to it without much issue. And I have no way to properly weighting the evidence and ultimately no experimental proof that could increase or decrease my confidence in a significant way. No “skin in the game”, besides wanting to get a warm fuzzy feeling from my historical models.
But again, I think this is not to say that certain hyptohesis (e.g. the Greek invented a vaccum based steam engine) can’t be certainly discounted, and I think that in of itself can be quite useful, you are correct there.