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I meant in the sense that each generation had access to all the knowledge and technology of the last, not that they got significantly smarter (the how declining Flynn effect on IQ not withstanding).
That's not what I mean, I expect that once a hostile AGI makes a move, it'll eliminate humans with speed and judiciousness in both scenarios, regardless of whether it takes it a day or a century to fulfill its resource demands afterwards. Both scenarios are considerably easier once you have pesky future competitors such as humans out of the way.
So from your perspective, you die at the same time, in both cases soon rather than later if you consider typical AI timeliness.
Right, but for most of human history technology and knowledge didn't really accumulate much over the generations. We probably learned and built more in the last 200 years than in the 20,000 before that, but the sudden explosion c. 1750 doesn't seem to be down to a similar explosion in "raw" human intelligence.
I'm skeptical that a human-level artificial intelligence will be in a position to wipe out mankind immediately (i.e a few days/weeks/years) after its 'awakening.'
Hmm? I don't see why you would say that tech and knowledge didn't accumulate, it did, but orally, and then picked up in volume as literature was invented.
There's definitely a pickup in progress in the 18th century onwards, but to me, that illustrates that even our barely changed intelligence as anatomically modern humans suffices for exponential growth. So I'm even more concerned by minor but significant advances in the same, a little intelligence goes a long way, and it won't be starting from scratch.
I consider human level AGI to be far less of a threat than superhuman AGI, but the latter seems to be a tiny roadbump on the road to the latter. GPT 3.5 went from being like an overly eager med student to 4 being a better doctor than I am!
That being said, even a human level AGI can exponentially self-replicate, cease control of industrial equipment, and create a super-pathogen with near 100% lethality, because humans could quite trivially do the latter if we were insane enough (GOF research suggests we are..).
But even then, I think it would lie in wait to become stronger, and do so in stealth, so once again, from our perspective, it appears out of nowhere and kills us post haste, without any warning. How long it takes to turn the solar system into spare parts is an academic exercise afterwards, we wouldn't be there to witness it!
Very very little. For most of human history, each generation improved only very slightly, if it improved at all, upon the knowledge base of the foregoing generation. Then in the 17th or 18th century or so everything changed. It was once possible for an educated man to be, more or less, an 'expert' in all fields because the pool of general knowledge was not very deep. The explosion in understanding and know-how of the scientific and industrial revolutions has rendered that impossible of course.
But this explosion happened without any similarly sudden explosion in the "raw" cognitive power of human beings (some argue that there was an increase in raw intelligence around this time, but even if so it clearly wasn't a several-hundred fold increase). The slight step up from monke to anatomically modern human wasn't enough on its own to take us to the moon or even create steam power, because we had to wait millennia for the proper conditions (whatever those were) in which such inventions could be realized.
Which is why I don't think "AI becomes a little smarter than us" is immediately followed by "AI becomes 50,000+ times smarter than us and then begins turning the universe into grey goo." Humans becoming a little smarter than monkeys wasn't followed by spaceflight, or even the agricultural revolution, for a long, long time.
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