What makes the intelligence cycle zero-sum? What devalues the 10 MIPs advance? After all, the goal is not to earn a living with the prize money brought in by an Incredible Digital Turk, but to design superior probability-space searching programming algorithms, using chess as a particular challenge, then to use that to solve other problems which are not moving targets, like machine vision or materials analysis or...alright, I admit to ignorance here. I just suspect that not all goals for intelligence involve competing with/modeling other growing intelligences.
Technological advances (which seem similar enough to “increases in the ability to achieve goals in the world” to be worthy of a tentative analogy) may help some (the 20 MIPs crowd) disproportionately, but don’t they frequently still help everyone who implements them? If people in Africa get cellphones, but people in Europe get supercomputers, all people are still getting an economic advantage relative to their previous selves; they can use resources better than they could previously.
Also, if point 3″ is phrased equally as vaguely as 3′ (perhaps: “Wealthy people are able to do things to increase the values in 2″.”), then it seems much more reasonable. Wealth can be used to obtain information and contacts that giver greater relative wealth-growing advantage, such as “Don’t just put it all in the bank,” or “My cousin’s company is about to announce higher-than-expected earnings,” or even “Global hyperinflation is coming, transfer assets to precious metals.” Conversely (I think), if point 3′ had a formulation sufficiently specific to be similarly limited (“Computers can keep having more RAM installed and thus will have more intelligence over time.”), I don’t see how that would be an indictment of the general case. What am I missing?
What makes the intelligence cycle zero-sum? What devalues the 10 MIPs advance? After all, the goal is not to earn a living with the prize money brought in by an Incredible Digital Turk, but to design superior probability-space searching programming algorithms, using chess as a particular challenge, then to use that to solve other problems which are not moving targets, like machine vision or materials analysis or...alright, I admit to ignorance here. I just suspect that not all goals for intelligence involve competing with/modeling other growing intelligences.
Technological advances (which seem similar enough to “increases in the ability to achieve goals in the world” to be worthy of a tentative analogy) may help some (the 20 MIPs crowd) disproportionately, but don’t they frequently still help everyone who implements them? If people in Africa get cellphones, but people in Europe get supercomputers, all people are still getting an economic advantage relative to their previous selves; they can use resources better than they could previously.
Also, if point 3″ is phrased equally as vaguely as 3′ (perhaps: “Wealthy people are able to do things to increase the values in 2″.”), then it seems much more reasonable. Wealth can be used to obtain information and contacts that giver greater relative wealth-growing advantage, such as “Don’t just put it all in the bank,” or “My cousin’s company is about to announce higher-than-expected earnings,” or even “Global hyperinflation is coming, transfer assets to precious metals.” Conversely (I think), if point 3′ had a formulation sufficiently specific to be similarly limited (“Computers can keep having more RAM installed and thus will have more intelligence over time.”), I don’t see how that would be an indictment of the general case. What am I missing?