Would the title of this just be better as “What would it look like if AGI was near?”. I feel a bit confused what the additional “if it looked like” clause is doing.
I assume it’s a reference to a famous quip by Wittgenstein. Supposedly someone said to him something along the lines of “Well, of course everyone thought the sun went around the earth because it looks as if the sun goes around the earth”, and he replied “So, what would it have looked like if it had looked like the earth was rotating?”.
The point being that when we say “it looks as if X”, meaning implicitly ”… and not Y”, it’s not necessarily because it actually looks any less like Y (and if Y is true, then presumably it does in fact look as it would have looked if Y); it could just be that our ability to understand what Y would look like, or to think of Y as a possibility at all, is insufficient.
Presumably Bjartur considers that AGI may well in fact be very near. “What would it look like if AGI was near?” suggests (even if it doesn’t quite imply) that AGI isn’t in fact near and we’re asking how the world would look different if it were near. If in fact AGI may be near in the real world, we don’t want to be looking just for differences. So, instead, Bjartur suggests looking back from a future in which it turns out that AGI was near all along, and asking what in that situation we expect things to look like around now.
Would the title of this just be better as “What would it look like if AGI was near?”. I feel a bit confused what the additional “if it looked like” clause is doing.
I assume it’s a reference to a famous quip by Wittgenstein. Supposedly someone said to him something along the lines of “Well, of course everyone thought the sun went around the earth because it looks as if the sun goes around the earth”, and he replied “So, what would it have looked like if it had looked like the earth was rotating?”.
The point being that when we say “it looks as if X”, meaning implicitly ”… and not Y”, it’s not necessarily because it actually looks any less like Y (and if Y is true, then presumably it does in fact look as it would have looked if Y); it could just be that our ability to understand what Y would look like, or to think of Y as a possibility at all, is insufficient.
Presumably Bjartur considers that AGI may well in fact be very near. “What would it look like if AGI was near?” suggests (even if it doesn’t quite imply) that AGI isn’t in fact near and we’re asking how the world would look different if it were near. If in fact AGI may be near in the real world, we don’t want to be looking just for differences. So, instead, Bjartur suggests looking back from a future in which it turns out that AGI was near all along, and asking what in that situation we expect things to look like around now.
Oh, well, I definitely didn’t get that reference. But that definitely makes me more sympathetic to the title.