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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   38429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023

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If you want to do something 'better' or 'faster' you have to do it differently in some way from how it was being done before

Take 'theoretical mathematics' as an example. Progress there is, to some extent, made by 'smart people thinking, scribbling, and talking'. An AI that was just 'JvN and colleagues but 1000x faster' could ... do that 1000x faster. Something similar applies to technology, economics, and war - the relation to the physical world means there's less of a speedup, but there's still some. An AI doesn't have to do anything that different from humans to get to in 50 years what humans would in 500.

progress there is, to some extent, made by 'smart people thinking, scribbling, and talking'.

A lot rides on "to what extent?" It's not clear to me that if you just 'sped up' the brains of top mathematicians or physicists by 10x or 50x or whatever it would actually cause a commensurate explosion in scientific breakthroughs.

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