a massive quantitative gap in capabilities with a human
Quantity has a quality of its own:
An intelligence that becomes an expert in many sciences, could see connections that others would not notice.
Being faster can make a difference between solving a problem on time, and solving it too late. Merely being first means you can get a patent, become a Schelling point, establish a monopoly...
Reducing your mistake rate from 5% to 0.000001% allows you to design and execute much more complex plans.
(My point is that calling an advantage “quantitative” does not make it mostly harmless.)
This is because in real life, speed and resources matter because they’re both finite. Unlike a Turing machine that can assume both arbitrarily high memory and time, we don’t have such things.
Quantity has a quality of its own:
An intelligence that becomes an expert in many sciences, could see connections that others would not notice.
Being faster can make a difference between solving a problem on time, and solving it too late. Merely being first means you can get a patent, become a Schelling point, establish a monopoly...
Reducing your mistake rate from 5% to 0.000001% allows you to design and execute much more complex plans.
(My point is that calling an advantage “quantitative” does not make it mostly harmless.)
+1 for “quantity has a quality all its own”. “More is different” pops up everywhere.
This is because in real life, speed and resources matter because they’re both finite. Unlike a Turing machine that can assume both arbitrarily high memory and time, we don’t have such things.