Thanks for this; this is causing me to rethink my timelines estimates.
As I understand it, a short version of your argument would be: “Elephants didn’t evolve intelligence, despite being long-lived social mammals with huge brains and the ability to manipulate objects. But their environment wasn’t that different from the human environment. So getting the right environment for AGI might be tricky.”
To be precise, the argument is that elephants (or other animals in similar situations) *wouldn’t* evolve to human-level intelligence. The fact that they *didn’t* isn’t very much information (for anthropic reasons, because if they did then it’d be them wondering why primates didn’t get to elephant-level intelligence).
And then we should also consider that the elephant environment isn’t a randomly-sampled environment either, but is also correlated with ours (which means we should also anthropically discount this).
Thanks for this; this is causing me to rethink my timelines estimates.
As I understand it, a short version of your argument would be: “Elephants didn’t evolve intelligence, despite being long-lived social mammals with huge brains and the ability to manipulate objects. But their environment wasn’t that different from the human environment. So getting the right environment for AGI might be tricky.”
To be precise, the argument is that elephants (or other animals in similar situations) *wouldn’t* evolve to human-level intelligence. The fact that they *didn’t* isn’t very much information (for anthropic reasons, because if they did then it’d be them wondering why primates didn’t get to elephant-level intelligence).
And then we should also consider that the elephant environment isn’t a randomly-sampled environment either, but is also correlated with ours (which means we should also anthropically discount this).