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This is: Misconceptions about continuous takeoff , published by Matthew Barnett on the AI Alignment Forum.
There has been considerable debate over whether development in AI will experience a discontinuity, or whether it will follow a more continuous growth curve. Given the lack of consensus and the confusing, diverse terminology, it is natural to hypothesize that much of the debate is due to simple misunderstandings. Here, I seek to dissolve some misconceptions about the continuous perspective, based mostly on how I have seen people misinterpret it in my own experience.
First, we need to know what I even mean by continuous takeoff. When I say it, I mean a scenario where the development of competent, powerful AI follows a trajectory that is roughly in line with what we would have expected by extrapolating from past progress. That is, there is no point at which a single project lunges forward in development and creates an AI that is much more competent than any other project before it. This leads to the first clarification,
Continuous doesn't necessarily mean slow
The position I am calling "continuous" has been called a number of different names over the years. Many refer to it as "slow" or "soft." I think continuous is preferable to these terms because it focuses attention on the strategically relevant part of the question. It seems to matter less what the actual clock-time is from AGI to superintelligence, and instead matters more if there are will be single projects who break previous technological trends and gain capabilities that are highly unusual relative to the past.
Moreover, there are examples of rapid technological developments that I consider to be continuous. As an example, consider GANs. In 2014, GANs were used to generate low quality black-and-white photos of human faces. By late 2018, they were used to create nearly-photorealistic images of human faces.
Yet, at no point during this development did any project leap forward by a huge margin. Instead, every paper built upon the last one by making minor improvements and increasing the compute involved. Since these minor improvements nonetheless happened rapidly, the result is that the GANs followed a fast development relative to the lifetimes of humans.
Extrapolating from this progress, we can assume that GAN video generation will follow a similar trajectory, starting with simple low resolution clips, and gradually transitioning to the creation of HD videos. What would be unusual is if someone right now in late 2019 produces some HD videos using GANs.
Large power differentials can still happen in a continuous takeoff
Power differentials between nations, communities, and people are not unusual in the course of history. Therefore, the existence of a deep power differential caused by AI would not automatically imply that a discontinuity has occurred.
In a continuous takeoff, a single nation or corporation might still pull ahead in AI development by a big margin and use this to their strategic advantage. To see how, consider how technology in the industrial revolution was used by western European nations to conquer much of the world.
Nations rich enough to manufacture rifles maintained a large strategic advantage over those unable to. Despite this, the rifle did not experience any surprising developments which catapulted it to extreme usefulness, as far as I can tell. Instead, sharpshooting became gradually more accurate, with each decade producing slightly better rifles.
See also: Soft takeoff can still lead to decisive strategic advantage
Continuous takeoff doesn't require believing that ems will come first
This misconception seems to mostly be a historical remnant of the Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-Foom debate. In the old days, there weren't many people actively criticizing foom. So, if you disagreed with foom, it was probab...
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