Man, the problem is that you say the “jump to newly accessible domains” will be the thing that lets you take over the world. So what’s up for dispute is the prototype being enough to take over the world rather than years of progress by a giant lab on top of the prototype. It doesn’t help if you say “I expect new things to sometimes become possible” if you don’t further say something about the impact of the very early versions of the product.
Maybe you’ll want to say that however much Google spends on that, they must rationally anticipate at least that much added revenue
If e.g. people were spending $1B/year developing a technology, and then after a while it jumps from 0/year to $1B/year of profit, I’m not that surprised. (Note that machine translation is radically smaller than this, I don’t know the numbers.)
I do suspect they could have rolled out a crappy version earlier, perhaps by significantly changing their project. But why would they necessarily bother doing that? For me this isn’t violating any of the principles that make your stories sound so crazy. The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
(Note: it is surprising if an industry is spending $10T/year on R&D and then jumps from $1T --> $10T of revenue in one year in a world that isn’t yet growing crazily. The surprising depends a lot on the numbers involved, and in particular on how valuable it would have been to deploy a worse version earlier and how hard it is to raise money at different scales.)
The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
Would you say that this is a good description of Suddenly Hominids but you don’t expect that to happen again, or that this is a bad description of hominids?
It’s not a description of hominids at all, no one spent any money on R&D.
I think there are analogies where this would be analogous to hominids (which I think are silly, as we discuss in the next part of this transcript). And there are analogies where this is a bad description of hominids (which I prefer).
Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.
Man, the problem is that you say the “jump to newly accessible domains” will be the thing that lets you take over the world. So what’s up for dispute is the prototype being enough to take over the world rather than years of progress by a giant lab on top of the prototype. It doesn’t help if you say “I expect new things to sometimes become possible” if you don’t further say something about the impact of the very early versions of the product.
If e.g. people were spending $1B/year developing a technology, and then after a while it jumps from 0/year to $1B/year of profit, I’m not that surprised. (Note that machine translation is radically smaller than this, I don’t know the numbers.)
I do suspect they could have rolled out a crappy version earlier, perhaps by significantly changing their project. But why would they necessarily bother doing that? For me this isn’t violating any of the principles that make your stories sound so crazy. The crazy part is someone spending $1B and then generating $100B/year in revenue (much less $100M and then taking over the world).
(Note: it is surprising if an industry is spending $10T/year on R&D and then jumps from $1T --> $10T of revenue in one year in a world that isn’t yet growing crazily. The surprising depends a lot on the numbers involved, and in particular on how valuable it would have been to deploy a worse version earlier and how hard it is to raise money at different scales.)
Would you say that this is a good description of Suddenly Hominids but you don’t expect that to happen again, or that this is a bad description of hominids?
It’s not a description of hominids at all, no one spent any money on R&D.
I think there are analogies where this would be analogous to hominids (which I think are silly, as we discuss in the next part of this transcript). And there are analogies where this is a bad description of hominids (which I prefer).
Spending money on R&D is essentially the expenditure of resources in order to explore and optimize over a promising design space, right? That seems like a good description of what natural selection did in the case of hominids. I imagine this still sounds silly to you, but I’m not sure why. My guess is that you think natural selection isn’t relevantly similar because it didn’t deliberately plan to allocate resources as part of a long bet that it would pay off big.
I think natural selection has lots of similarities to R&D, but (i) there are lots of ways of drawing the analogy, (ii) some important features of R&D are missing in evolution, including some really important ones for fast takeoff arguments (like the existence of actors who think ahead).
If someones wants to spell out why they think evolution of hominids means takeoff is fast then I’m usually happy to explain why I disagree with their particular analogy. I think this happens in the next discord log between me and Eliezer.