On one hand, I think I still disagree with the thrust of this post. I think the way we might trade with ants (or bees or dogs or horses, etc), is still just really different from what people typically have in mind when they’re asking why AI might keep us alive, and the prospects discussed here are not reassuring to me. (And I have model-driven guesses of why superintelligences could build replacements for whatever humans are comparatively good at)
But, this post and the comments still prompted a lot of interesting thoughts. I appreciate posts that do a kind of “original seeing” on longstanding common arguments. I think I learned some things that are at least plausibly relevant to some kinds of AI takeoff here, and I also just learned or reconceptualized a lot of interesting stuff about how humans and animals interact.
Curated.
On one hand, I think I still disagree with the thrust of this post. I think the way we might trade with ants (or bees or dogs or horses, etc), is still just really different from what people typically have in mind when they’re asking why AI might keep us alive, and the prospects discussed here are not reassuring to me. (And I have model-driven guesses of why superintelligences could build replacements for whatever humans are comparatively good at)
But, this post and the comments still prompted a lot of interesting thoughts. I appreciate posts that do a kind of “original seeing” on longstanding common arguments. I think I learned some things that are at least plausibly relevant to some kinds of AI takeoff here, and I also just learned or reconceptualized a lot of interesting stuff about how humans and animals interact.