Humanity is in a FOOM relative to the rest of the biosphere but of course it doesn’t seem ridiculously fast to us; the question from our standpoint is whether a brain in a box in a basement can go FOOM relative to human society. Anyone who thinks that because we’re already growing at a high rate, the distinction between that and a nanotech-capable superintelligence must not be very important, is being just a little silly. It may not even be wise to call them by the same name, if it tempts you to such folly—and so I would suggest reserving “FOOM” for things that go very fast relative to you.
For the record, I’ve been a coder and judged myself a reasonable hacker—set out to design my own programming language at one point, which I say not as a mark of virtue but just to demonstrate that I was in the game. (Gave it up when I realized AI wasn’t about programming languages.)
Humanity is in a FOOM relative to the rest of the biosphere but of course it doesn’t seem ridiculously fast to us; the question from our standpoint is whether a brain in a box in a basement can go FOOM relative to human society. Anyone who thinks that because we’re already growing at a high rate, the distinction between that and a nanotech-capable superintelligence must not be very important, is being just a little silly. It may not even be wise to call them by the same name, if it tempts you to such folly—and so I would suggest reserving “FOOM” for things that go very fast relative to you.
For the record, I’ve been a coder and judged myself a reasonable hacker—set out to design my own programming language at one point, which I say not as a mark of virtue but just to demonstrate that I was in the game. (Gave it up when I realized AI wasn’t about programming languages.)